ESSENTIALS
Firm Name: HK Associates
Principals: Kathy Hancox, Michael Kothke
Headquarters: Tucson, Arizona
Accolades: Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects,” 2025
House Name: Casa Luce
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Area & Layout: 3,558 square feet; 3 BR, 4 BA
Architectural Photographer: Ema Peter Photography (emapeter.com)
Designed in the mid-1960s by Tucson modernist Tom Gist, the house now known as Casa Luce felt more confining than contemporary when the current owners purchased it five years ago. Turning its back on views of the Santa Rita Mountains, the home’s interior revolved around a dim central kitchen and an awkward sunken garden bounded by stout masonry columns that held up the roof but restricted movement through the space.
Asked to bring this Summer of Love relic into the present, architects Kathy Hancox and Michael Kothke of HK Associates shook out the cobwebs, peeling away dated finishes and visual obstructions while reconfiguring the floor plan to give Gist’s ambitious design the clarity and serenity it lacked. “Our approach was to consider ‘preservation’ as an active and creative architectural practice, rather than a nostalgic one,” Hancox explains.
Thanks to some engineering sleight-of-hand, she and Kothke managed to eliminate the central columns and replace the low, cluttered ceiling with a single floating Douglas fir plane that calms the space like a collective sigh. “One of the most satisfying aspects of the project was discovering just how much transformation could emerge through both bold and careful subtraction,” Hancox says.
To bring light into the interior, the architects added skylights—including a baffled one over the bedroom hallway that charts the sun’s movement through the day and illuminates a frosted-glass panel at the rear of the kitchen, lending that space an ethereal glow.
“Revealing the overlooked window wall—long obscured by curtains—was another turning point,” says Hancox, who ditched the draperies and refinished the fir surround, revealing not only the beauty of the design but the stellar view of the landscape beyond. The home’s earthy palette of Querobabi adobe, lime plaster walls and natural wood helps link it to the desert setting, as do the broad steps that now cascade down to an infinity pool out back.
Like all of HK Associates’ work, Casa Luce displays a purity and a discipline that stands in contrast to its unruly desert setting, while at the same time evoking the rugged authenticity that defines it.