There are lots of ways to create a home design. You can throw together hot-button details, materials, and appliances until the place looks like the main showroom at Trendi-Mart. Alternatively, you can use a safe, simple design scheme to discipline space and color into rooms as orderly as a row of gravestones.

Or you can have lots of fun asking a piece of property about its history and teasing its favorite memories into the open. You can introduce those memories to a family’s treasures, blending all into a coherent whole, orchestrating currents of tension and calm until each element enhances the others and the disparate parts don’t just establish an architectural dialogue, they yammer their heads off.

The third approach takes more time, involvement, and imagination, but Ansaldi Shaw Design wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rick Ansaldi and Lee Shaw met some years back when they both worked in Santa Fe. They formed a partnership and relocated to Tucson four years ago. About half the firm’s work is residential and half commercial, with an emphasis on restaurants. They’ve designed imaginative eateries from Santa Fe to San Francisco, including the new Satellite Café in Albuquerque.

Commercial or residential, Ansaldi Shaw Design weighs potential clients on a scale of what is most exciting, challenging, and above all, fun. Rick Ansaldi characterizes the business as “not so much an architectural office as a design studio.” About their growing residential clientele, he adds, “They’re finding us.”