Susan Solliday has a way of entering a room that makes you feel she has already considered every corner of it. That instinct, she will tell you, did not come from real estate. It came from years of working in interior design, producing designer showhouses, and staging gala events for nonprofits across the Phoenix area, from standing in half-finished rooms making decisions about light and proportion and what a space should feel like before anyone lived in it. Real estate, when it finally claimed her, was less a career change than a natural migration.
Her partner, Jennifer Vatistas, brought the same foundation from a different angle. Also trained in interior design, Jennifer built her career around renovation and the art of transforming a space from what it is into what it could be. She has an eye for sequencing: what needs to be resolved structurally before anything cosmetic is considered, how finishes speak to each other across a room, where staging should amplify what is already there rather than mask what is not. The two knew they had something special when Jennifer's room at one of Susan's showhouses stopped visitors in the doorway. They have been working together ever since, building what is now known as Luxe Client Group, a luxury residential real estate team operating under Compass in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Central Phoenix, and the East Valley.
Phoenix, then and now
Susan has called the Valley home for more than three decades and has watched the market change its rhythm, if not its character. When she arrived, the city's luxury segment was defined largely by spec homes and golf-course adjacency. Waterfront living, in the traditional sense, did not exist. What did exist was land, light, and an architectural vocabulary still finding itself.
Today Phoenix feels entirely different. The luxury buyer has become more sophisticated, more likely to have sold a home in California, New York, or the Pacific Northwest and arrived in the desert with genuine taste and specific requirements. The design-build environment has kept pace. Contractors are harder to book. Renovations are more ambitious. And a fully renovated, move-in-ready home commands a premium that would have seemed implausible fifteen years ago.
"The buyer who is coming to us now has done their research," Susan says. "They have looked at every listing on the market. They know what a basic renovation looks like, and they know when something is different. Our job is to make sure they understand exactly what they are looking at and why it matters. That is where our design background becomes the deciding factor. We are not interpreting a home from the outside. We are reading it the same way its architect did."
"Real estate found us through the work we were already doing. The eye you develop producing a showhouse is exactly the eye you need to present a home."
Jennifer puts it more directly. "A buyer with a good eye deserves representation with an equally good eye. That is a harder standard to meet than most people realize."
From showhouses to sold
Before dedicating herself to real estate, Susan's professional life was organized around a single question: how do you create an experience that stays with people? Her background in interior design gave her a fluency in space and materiality that most agents never develop. Showhouse production required her to recruit and direct some of the Valley's most accomplished designers, manage competing aesthetic visions, and deliver a finished product that felt cohesive rather than curated by committee. Nonprofit galas demanded the same discipline at a different scale, coordinating donors, venues, vendors, and narrative into a single evening that justified the investment.
"Real estate found us through the work we were already doing," she says. "The clients who were attending these events, who were engaging with the design community at that level, were also buying and selling homes. They began asking questions. What do you think of this neighborhood? Do you know this builder? Could you walk through this property with me?"
Over time, those conversations became transactions. Susan brought the producer's command: the ability to manage complexity, hold a vision, and coordinate a dozen moving parts without losing the thread. She also brought a transactional foundation that most design-educated agents never build: experience inside law firms and escrow, and across every level of real estate from raw land assemblage through new construction. Jennifer brought something equally rare: a renovation eye trained across four countries and two decades of design-build work that most agents in this market have never encountered.
Together, the two bring a combined professional credential that is genuinely rare in the luxury market. Both are NCIDQ-certified interior designers. Both carry active real estate licenses. Both have spent careers developing the analytical and aesthetic judgment that listing and buying at this level requires. Their clients rarely encounter that combination in a single agent, let alone a team.
The renovation eye
Jennifer Vatistas came to real estate through a career built on transformation. Trained as an interior designer with an NCIDQ certification and more than two decades of project experience across New York, the Hamptons, London, and Cairo, she has spent her professional life inside properties at the moment of becoming. Her work was never about surfaces. It was about sequence: what needs to resolve structurally before anything cosmetic is considered, how light moves through a space across a day, where the bones of a home either support or limit what a renovation can achieve.
That experience produced an eye that most agents simply do not have. Jennifer can walk a property before listing and understand, almost immediately, which improvements will return value and which will disappear into the noise. Her staging direction is not decorative; it is strategic, built on how buyers actually read a room and what details shift a showing from interested to committed.
"Square footage is a data point," she says. "It is not the story. The story is the quality of the light, how the materials relate to each other, and what the scale of a room says about how you are meant to live in it."
Her path to Luxe Client Group ran through the design community Susan was already building. What began as a shared creative sensibility became a shared professional vision. The team they have built together reflects both: disciplined, design-literate, and uncommonly rigorous about the work.
A team built on intentional reach
Luxe Client Group represents their clients under Compass, a platform they chose deliberately for its data infrastructure, private network capabilities, and national reach. But the tool Susan speaks about with particular conviction is their relationship with Métier Maison, a curated luxury real estate collective founded in 2024 that prioritizes relationship-driven buyer matching over broad listing distribution. Inclusion in that network is not automatic. Luxe Client Group was among the founding members invited personally by Métier Maison’s founder, Khaki, in its inaugural year. Based in Rancho Santa Fe and built on a career in creative marketing strategy, Khaki founded Métier Maison to fill a gap she saw clearly: the luxury real estate industry had no reliable way to connect qualified clients across global markets through relationships rather than algorithms. That invitation places Luxe Client Group at the center of exactly that network.
"The difference between broadcasting a property and placing it is significant," she says. "Most sellers assume that more exposure automatically means a better outcome. Sometimes it does. But for a home at this level, the right ten buyers are worth more than a thousand casual impressions."
That relationship gives Luxe Client Group access to a network of vetted agents representing qualified buyers across feeder markets: California, Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and beyond. Susan tracks buyer origin data by ZIP code as part of every listing strategy, mapping where interest actually comes from and positioning properties accordingly. It is a level of analytical rigor that surprises some sellers, who expect instinct and receive evidence instead. Both Susan and Jennifer operate from the same framework: understand where the right buyer is coming from before deciding how and where to reach them.
"For a home at this level, the right ten buyers are worth more than a thousand casual impressions."
The way they present a property
When Luxe Client Group takes on a listing, the process begins well before the photographer arrives. Jennifer walks the property first with a renovation lens, identifying what has been done, what remains, and what the market will reward if addressed. Her recommendations are precise and prioritized, not a wish list but a sequenced plan. Susan then layers the marketing strategy on top of that foundation, connecting the property's physical story to the buyer most likely to understand its value.
The staging direction flows from the same logic. Jennifer does not approach a furnished home the way a stylist does. She approaches it the way a designer does, considering sightlines, scale, and the emotional register of each room. The goal is not to make a home look attractive in photographs, though it achieves that too. The goal is to help a buyer feel, while standing in the space, that the life they want is already possible here.
"We think about the atmosphere of a space," Jennifer says. "The quality of the light, how the materials feel together, what the scale of a room says about how you are meant to live in it. Square footage is a data point. It is not the story."
That orientation shapes everything, from how they instruct their stager to what language appears in the listing description to how they brief the photographer. The Cristallo stone countertop that is backlit with adjustable warmth is not a feature to be mentioned in a bullet point. It is a detail that tells you something about the person who designed this house and the life they imagined inside it.
For sellers, the effect is a process that feels unusually managed. Susan and Jennifer handle coordination with contractors, stagers, title, and legal so completely that many clients describe going weeks without needing to make a single decision. "That is the goal," Susan says. "You hired us because this is complicated. Our job is to make it feel effortless on your end."
What the desert teaches you
Ask either Susan or Jennifer what the Phoenix market has taught them that they could not have learned elsewhere, and both pause before answering. It is not a rehearsed question, and they do not give a rehearsed answer.
"This market rewards honesty," Susan says finally. "Buyers here are often coming from places with different price-per-square-foot realities. They can misread what they are seeing. A home that looks like a bargain relative to California may be priced exactly right for Phoenix. A home that seems expensive may be the only fully renovated property in a five-mile radius." She pauses. "Our job is to help people understand what they are actually looking at. Not to sell them something. To give them the information they need to make the right decision."
It is a philosophy that sounds simple and is, in practice, difficult to sustain. It requires advisors who will tell a seller that their timeline is unrealistic, or that their price needs to be reconsidered, or that the buyer who just submitted an offer is the right one, even when the conversation is uncomfortable.
For Luxe Client Group, that willingness to lead with candor rather than comfort is less a strategy than a reflection of where they came from. The showhouse, the gala, the design studio: all of them required the same thing. The ability to walk into a high-stakes environment, assess what is actually true, and act accordingly.
In the desert, it turns out, that is exactly the skill the market needs most.
Luxe Client Group is a luxury residential real estate team operating under Compass in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and Central Phoenix, Arizona. Co-founded by Susan Solliday and Jennifer Vatistas, both NCIDQ-certified interior designers and licensed Arizona REALTORS, the team has advised over $128 million in combined residential sales across Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Central Phoenix, and the East Valley. The team also includes licensed agent Brooke Hoelzen, bringing more than 45 years of Valley market knowledge and a specialty in historic, Mid-Century Modern, and architecturally significant homes. Luxe Client Group is a founding-year member of the Métier Maison luxury real estate network, invited personally by the network’s founder.
LUXE CLIENT GROUP · COMPASS · PHOENIX & EAST VALLEY
