5 Ideas to Nail Modern Desert Décor This Spring

Living in or moving to a new home in the desert can require some precise planning especially when it comes to your decor. The Arizona desert includes some of the most beautiful creatures and plants with some of the most vibrant colors imaginable. Often times homeowners want to seamlessly blend the beauty of the outdoors with their indoor living space. Here are some modern desert décor ideas that can help your home capture the same remarkable beauty that surrounds your desert home.

Modern Desert Décor Requires a Balance of Warmth and Coolness

When you choose a perfect, modern décor for your desert home, remember that not everything has to be in the stereotypically southwestern light adobe with silver and turquoise accents (unless that is your preferred style, of course!).

Styling your home and belongings in desert décor requires a combination of warm and cool colors. All warm colors can keep your senses perpetually riled up and feeling warmer than normal. All cool colors can chill your senses and can actually delay adaptation to a desert environment. Instead, share these tips below with your friends and family to come up with a unified theme.

1. Blocks of Rich, Dark Brown Soil Color

Not everything has to be in pink and pale reds. Remind your senses of the color of rich, dark soil by using rectangular vases, key stands, door stops, stereo speakers, and end tables in rich, chocolate brown. Use actual, real dark soil in brightly colored pots around the house to show off dark green shade plants. Put various shades of brown, tan, and adobe-colored pots filled with bright colored powder in stair-step patterns on small shelves. These will emphasize the earth tones while also bringing our pops of color into your home.

modern desert décor

This creates a nice, cooling effect and is particularly effective when combined with cool, dark greens, as is suggested below. By making sure that your entire interior is not sprayed in shades of sand, you keep the balance of dark and light, warmth and cool in your home.

Prefer a Warmer, Richer Hue? Try using a rich, burnt sienna or earthy clay pot color on one of your walls. The darker wall will close in the space from that direction, will make you feel warmer and cozier, and will still keep everything from being bright pale lavender and taupe. The rich, earthy red-brown color will also pair nicely with the vertical vases in chocolate brown mentioned above.

2. Dark Green and Luscious Desert Plants

While Yucca and Saguaro abound in the desert, not everything has to be the pale green color of plants with higher sun reflection. There are quite a few deep, dark green desert plants which make both your indoor and outdoor look luscious, refreshing, and cool-to-the-touch.

Fox Tail Agave is a beautiful, big-leafed succulent in nice, deep green color. Tree Aloe will both grow abundantly (and tall) in your yard and be a perfect indoor plant which requires very little watering. If you are missing being able to walk around barefoot on cool, green grass, then get some Mexican Thread Grass. Its tall, wispy leaves are perfect for a luxurious grass, it is comfortable to walk on, and (unlike other grasses) it is extremely drought tolerant.

modern desert décor

A fox tail agave plant can provide a nice deep green color to your space.

For an even cooler palette, mix some Desert Sage into the borders of your yard and in bowls through your house. Its frosty silvery foliage is easily eclipsed by its cool purple and blue flowers which bloom in profusion.

3. Cool Gray Patio Stones and Kitchen Flooring

Did you know that pale gray and even the rosiest adobe actually mix quite well in appearance? Emphasize the cool tones in the light gray stones by choosing a straight, square pattern, and use it for kitchen flooring, patio areas, and for cool, barefoot-and-sandal-friendly walking paths.

Cool, gray stone tiling is indicative of rock outcroppings which offer shade in the desert. Steer away from sand-colored tiles or warm tan patio flooring, as these will contribute even further to the warm desert tones in every direction.

Another great use for cool gray stone tiling is in your bathroom. Make the whole area feel like a spa by doing the floors, walls, and ceiling with the same tile. Don’t like gluing things down? Interlocking gray stone appearance is available to measure and then purchase. You won’t have to worry about water getting down between the cracks because open doors and evaporation will do most of the work for you.

 

 

Modern desert décor ideas are essential to making you feel comfortable in your new home. Make sure you get a feel for the types of stones available and how they will look in an enclosed space. It is fairly easy to keep things clean and nice-looking in the desert, so make sure that you choose the lighter of two gray choices to keep things looking clean and fresh.

 

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4. Drought Resistant Colorful Vines on Broad, Flat Pergolas

Are you missing your garden from a previous home? Put tables, chairs, benches, and outdoor sofas underneath long, wide, wooden pergola arches. Pergolas, or the square, flat-topped version of curved vine arbors, create nice, cool patios and can shade large areas at a time.

Pergolas can be customized to form a very large shade area, as big as you want, and you can increase the shade even further by adding in vines to grow in between the holes and blocking out more of the sun.

modern desert décor

Heavily colorful and drought-resistant vines include Pyrostegia Venusta (bright orange) and Bougainvillea (cool, bright, violet-pink). A particular Arizona favorite is Arizona Grape Ivy, which has light yellow-green leaves, small yellow flowers, and looks particularly attractive in the sun, trailing down from the roof of a patio pergola.

5. Deep Purple and Teal Accents

One of the biggest southwest staples is our adherence to Teal and Deep Purple, both of which naturally accent all shades and textures of adobe and which bring bright pops of color to the desert surroundings.

Modern desert design ideas include functional, as well as aesthetic, choices. A set of deep purple dishes, a bright purple window box with flowering sedum (succulents), or an accent table in purple or bright teal is a nice complement to your earthy and sandy environment.

modern desert décor

Want a little of each of these colors without being so bold about it? Place a couple of Amethyst rings on a small platter of purple agate rocks and set on a side table. Use teal or purple as your accent towels but not your main color which would look beautiful in a fresh cream color.

In all of your modern desert design ideas, make sure that the entire effect is golden, warm, attractive, and pleasing to the eye over and over again. If you are hesitant to make a dramatic change, only change one thing at a time and try it out for a week before changing something else. The effect of 5 “almost there” pieces can create one jarring experience, so be gentle and delicate about the changes you make, learning about your own desert preferences along the way.

Want to Make a Desert Home Your Dream?

What better way to implement these modern desert décor ideas than on a clean slate. The communities of The Village at Vistancia and Blackstone at Vistancia offer new home builds in Peoria that will give you the perfect opportunity to move into an amazing home with all of the features you are wanting conveniently built into them. There are also quick move-in homes available that might have the look and feel you are wanting off the bat and without having to wait as long.  Click here to find a home to find a new home today.  

 

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