Queen Creek Adobe Ranch near Mummy Mountain

This Queen Creek Adobe ranch home tucked in near Mummy Mountain offers considerable charm, much updating and a near-acre lot with some of the best valley views going! You’ll find a charming cooks kitchen, updated baths, saltillo tile floors and all the comfort and charm these wonderful ranch homes have to offer!



With a scenic and desirable Town of Paradise Valley location, a home like this can be enjoyed for all it’s simple charms, or could easily be developed into the luxury home of your dreams. This ranch home has a distinctive Mexican flair about it, yet it’s the kind of comfort-home you’d expect to find on a citrus lot Arcadia. You also find a lovely yard with mature trees, grassy play area, swimming pool, oversized carport with storage, bonus room, fireplace and more!

North Central House by George Christensen

This beautiful home was designed by George Christensen. Christensen has been recognized for his works in his 46 years of professional practice in Arizona. This home is no exception to one of his masterpieces.



Consider the location and features: A wonderful place to entertain with an outdoor covered living area, barbeque, sport court, built in trampoline, play pool, beautiful front court yard with fire pit.
Elegant wood floors, concrete floors, vaulted tongue and groove ceilings, beams, large family room, game room, wet bar with wine cooler, multiple fireplaces, gourmet kitchen, surround sound music wired throughout, 5 zone heating and cooling.

Ratzeburg School Complex by Mikou Design Studio

The new schools complex in Ratzeburg is located in a mainly residential cityscape, in the middle of an area of low-density detached housing, characterised by brick architecture and pitched roofs that make up the neighbourhood’s identity.This schools complex includes an existing specialised school, a primary school and a lower form secondary school, and it aims to be a strong, identifiable landmark in its urban setting, on the scale of the city of Ratzeburg and the county of Lauenburg.



The main aim of Mikou Design Studio scheme was to design and develop schools amenities within a consistent, uniform architectural whole which creates spatial centrality with a shared common core while clearly identifying each of the schools.
To meet the requirements of the brief for creating empty spaces for school playgrounds and to protect some existing trees, Mikou Design Studio designed the primary and secondary school buildings with free, flowing forms that sensitively link together the project’s internal and external spaces and which describe a sensual, organic figure on the site.
An overall view of the scheme’s layout is very organic, reminiscent of a plant pattern with a very strongly marked central core and branches that extend towards the site’s boundaries and contain spaces for the various school functions. Therefore the proposed scheme opens onto its urban setting through its large courtyards with their undulating, generous forms that alternate with the rhythm of the various primary and secondary school units.
The façades undulating along the school playgrounds are mainly glazed to provide maximum lighting of the classrooms and large transparent openings on the ground floor towards external spaces of planted courtyards. These façades consist of alternating clear glazing and white screen-printed glazing to protect the privacy of the classrooms and also to allow a play of vibrations and reflections accentuated by the curved movement of the buildings. Thus, from the inside of the spaces and from the outside, the visual perception is that of light, dynamic architecture that is vibrant by the play of reflections of light and the dense vegetation present on the site.
At the edge of the site, the façades become more opaque and are faced with smooth, reflective light grey metal panels, which rhythm the building on the streets – Mechower Strasse and Heinrich Scheele Strasse – while creating a strong contrast of perception with the transparent materiality in the courtyards.
In Mikou Design Studio scheme, the awakening of the senses of pupils in the primary and secondary schools is reflected through the flow of spaces, the changing perspectives, the dynamic of the circulation flows induced by the curved forms, the visual transparency towards the external spaces and towards the upper floors created by the double height of the entrance lobbies.

Atkins Celebrates Iris Bay Topping Out

Atkins officially celebrated one of the construction industry’s oldest customs, the structural ‘topping out’ of the 32-storey Iris Bay office and retail tower at Business Bay in Dubai.



Aside from the distinctive architectural design of this unusually shaped commercial building, Iris Bay was an early opportunity for Atkins to explore the challenges of sustainable design in a hot climate and incorporates both passive and active environmental features. The firm was commissioned as lead consultants for architecture, structural, mechanical and electrical engineering design, and project management for the entire development.
The tower comprises two identical double curved pixelated shells which are rotated and cantilevered over a four-storey podium, underneath which are three levels of basement designed to facilitate underground parking for 920 cars. The distinctive ovoid shape creates areas of negative pressure that draws air through the building and reduces the dependence upon mechanical ventilation for the underground car park in particular.
The rear elevation is a continuous vertical curve punctuated by balconies while the front elevation is made up of seven zones of rotated glass. This includes naturally ventilated spaces and integrated solar energy and shading films in the glass façade.
Last week, the site supervision team was joined by the client and key members of the design team in hosting a small function to celebrate the major milestone which culminated in the last structural slabs being poured atop the 170m tall structure.

Dunkerque Theater by Mikou Design Studio

Mikou Design Studio conceived the new Bateau Feu theatre in Dunkirk both as an open urban venue – which is welcoming by the diversity of the complementary programme of events and activities that it provides and their strategic orientation in the urban space – and as a structuring civic building and arts amenity located on the Place du Général de Gaulle square.



By its location on Place du Général de Gaulle, the Bateau Feu theatre orchestrates several scales and dimensions, with four free façades that face onto and react to various different urban situations: an intimate domestic scale on the west for housing and the planted garden, a public scale on Rue du Jeu de Paume, a developing future major thoroughfare onto which the shops of the future shopping centre face, and a non-institutional scale on Place du Général de Gaulle which questions the expression of a new contemporary theatre in the city.
On the east, the façade of the theatre’s large hall faces onto the urban space in an architectural and spatial composition which links together the inside and outside of the amenity.
On the south, the theatre “enters the city”, welcoming the public in the flow of spaces designed on the urban site. The open, generous entrance foyer – which is itself in dialogue and spatially connected with the large hall on the ground floor – and the small hall, the café bar, the bookshop and the lounge areas on a south-east diagonal which links together these social meeting-places.
The glazed monumental staircase leading to the raised foyer and to the upper entrance to the large hall, placed on the south façade on the side of the entrance esplanade, also participates in this spatial scenography of the theatre’s significant spaces. Visually, it opens the space on the underside of the forum pierced by large voids, allowing through top lighting and revealing the volume of the large hall.
A chandelier designed like a lighted canopy increases the theatrical effect and corresponds to the vibrations of the internal space.