Natural Transitions

Collectors Jim Carmichael and Marianne Mallia have created an indoor and outdoor sanctuary for art in their Scottsdale home.

- John O'Hern

Jim Carmichael and Marianne Mallia lived a long-distance relationship after the high school boy- and girlfriend rekindled their relationship at a high school reunion. Marianne, a medical writer, eventually moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where Jim, a builder and landscape designer lives. Each had large houses so they culled from each other’s collections and moved into a midcentury home that Jim had redesigned and rebuilt, raising the ceilings to create a better setting for art. The house came with its own work of art, a stainless steel fireplace surround that he points out is soldered rather than welded. He also designed outdoor spaces to be part of the house and to be settings for sculpture.

Marianne brought with her the first piece she ever bought, a traditional still life by Volney A. Richardson that reminded her of an earlier transition in her life, from working in a research lab to writing. “It seemed like a new beginning to me,” she explains. Jim brought Michelle Spiziri’s Trust Me, which he bought in Baltimore when he was attending a seminar. “It’s about male-female relationships,” he says, “and I wasn’t even sure I liked it. I went back to the gallery three times and, finally, couldn’t resist it.”

Transition is a perhaps unintentional theme in other pieces in their collection. Hanging above the piano is Silver Ascension, a painting of butterflies by Hunt Slonem. A collaboration between Max Hammond and Greg West, Mariposa, features West’s Trompe l’Oeil butterfly on an abstraction by Hammond. “There are changes in life,” Marianne notes. “People morph; there are changes in love, art taste changes. As you grow and age, you become more sophisticated.”