Building The Foundation
Like many Sedona homes, this one was designed to capitalize on the views. “They were interested in something unique, something modern. And of course, they wanted to maximize the views,” says Paul Pellicani, CEO and Founder of Scottsdale-based Architect’s LOFT and Highview Custom Homes, of the owners. “I can definitely tell you that it was the best job site I’ve ever stood on at 7 a.m. just because of the amazing views.” The roughly 5,000-square-foot Sedona property was a new build that took about two years to complete. The owners had purchased the land a few years ago and wanted to create a special second home. They reached out to the Architect’s LOFT because the company is a distributor for the custom home design company Lindal Homes. The owners wanted a three-bedroom home with spacious bedrooms as the pair likes to entertain guests, a two-car garage plus a workshop for the owner’s woodwork and a guest house.
An exterior shot of the Sedona home designed by Om Studio.
Architect’s LOFT had to figure out a way to organize the home to accommodate all of this. The company selected the Aura custom home model that features a butterfly roof design. The roof is made out of standing seam metal roofing, which simulates rusted roofing and has a patina and the appearance of weathered metal. The roof runs down from the exterior to the front of the entrance walls. “It’s this beautiful, seamless detail that just allows the roof to run right down the wall as you enter into the house,” he says. Like any project, this one presented the team with challenges. “The fact is the lot is long and narrow. Long in the same parallel to the street, but it wasn’t very deep, and it also had a very steep slope to it. High at the back and low down at the street,” he says. Due to the site’s slope, the team added a hairpin turn so the owners could gain access to the property from the street level. The paved driveway leads to one of the property’s most unique features: a seven foot cantilevered concrete entrance. “That was just a beautiful feature that actually just started on a table with myself and the owners and a sketch pad. And as we were creatively coming up with ideas, I said, ‘What do you think about cantilevering the front entrance walk? And they said, ‘Yeah, we love it,” says Paul. “And that’s how that came about: just from a simple hand sketch.” One of the other striking features is the red retaining wall made out of boulders that weigh thousands of pounds. The excavator was saving those boulders for a special home and finally found the one.
The home’s living room and outdoor patio.
Touring The Kitchen & Living Room
The kitchen and living room of the home are one large space. “The neat thing there is just the open flow of the kitchen, living, dining experience … because of all of the wonderful glass that we have. That’s a 20-foot-wide glass accordion door that you see. When we open that door up, it’s almost like the outside becomes the inside,” he says. Little details in this part of the home were key too.
The kitchen’s expansive marble island.
The kitchen has a long list of impressive features. The space is outfitted with real marble light fixtures hanging above the marble waterfall-edge island. The island’s metal base is the same angle as the roof pitch, and the ceiling is cedar wood. The floors are made out of tile that simulates stained concrete.
The home’s light-filled kitchen with rift and quartered oakwood cabinets.
The rift and quartered oakwood cabinets in the kitchen match the ones in the main bedroom’s closet. The pantry, even, was constructed out of custom wood used throughout the home. The backsplash is made out of marble, and the floating oak shelves have recessed strip lighting in them. “You’ll see this gorgeous halo effect right at those shelves that just played very nicely off that sort of mirrored finish of that backsplash,” he says.
A close-up of the range.
One common dilemma many architects face when working on a living room is where to put the TV and the fireplace without blocking those stunning Sedona views. The solution in this home? A recessed pit in the floor that features a hydraulic lift. The owners press a button and out pops a television. The lift lies beneath a nine-foot-long and two-foot-wide flapper door in the floor that’s the same color tile as the rest of living room so it blends in. The idea came about at another sketch pad meeting with the owners.
Another view of the home’s kitchen.
The living room features a mix of different elements that somehow manage to feel cohesive. “The interesting thing in this house is that it’s almost like the outside comes in. The sort of concrete looking floor picks up on the concrete entrance at the front of the house,” he says “And then the ceiling plane, which is again, sort of floating with all of that glass at the ceiling plane. The softness of the wood counters the hardness of the flooring,” he says. “The overall feeling of the space is warmth, elegance.”
Couches in the living room.
Many of the smaller details really brought the entire space together. The wood beams running across the ceiling are a great example of this. “The glulam beams that you see are what we call architectural grade. Glulam beams, it means that’s the highest level of finish that you can get. Because, of course, those could be painted. They don’t have to be exposed, like that, but the architectural grade, where we stain them, picked up beautifully on the cedar wood liner at the ceiling, which, as I told you before, had that wonderful range of color. The whole ceiling plane kind of melds together.” The living room also features a glass corner fireplace and then right outside the living space, there’s a firepit on the patio. “With the corner design, it addresses three spaces at one time,” he says. Paul’s favorite area of the home? “The living room is just a wonderful space,” he says. “It’s spectacular.”
The living room’s couch and kitchen with marble light fixtures.
Little Details Make A Big Difference
A home’s little details can make a big impression. The trim subcontractor created a one-quarter-inch gap in the horizontal trim bands. When the painter came in, he wondered what on Earth that gap was for. “What we did was we had him fill those gaps with caulk. So that was just a very small reveal, a quarter-inch vertical reveal, and that carried the vertical trim line. That detail, one little detail, carried that vertical trim line from the floor to the ceiling. Those kind of small details that sometimes make a house, because you don’t really notice it until you notice it,” he says. The owner, who has a woodworking hobby, created the powder bath vanity, which features a live-edge piece of wood. The vanity also included a hole big enough to accommodate a solid marble pedestal base that the owners purchased in Santa Fe. Paul estimated that the piece weighed 450 pounds.
The home’s main bedroom with a cedar ceiling.
A Closer Look At The Main Bedroom & Bathroom
Initially, the main bedroom featured a bedroom, a bathroom and a closet with a wall separating each space, mostly for sound purposes. While the team was onsite with the owner, they had the idea of keeping the closet wall at nine feet tall so it aligned with the windows overlooking Sedona’s red rocks and the bedroom wall at 14-feet-high. The ceiling of the walk-in closet with radiant floors was left open. “What that allowed was that beautiful ceiling plane to continuously be expressed right while you’re laying in bed. You see the whole thing just is laid out right in front of you. So they love the idea that we wound up doing that in a few different other spaces in the room as a thematic detail. Guest bedrooms, for example, we did the same thing,” says Paul. “You see all of that beautiful cedar liner and those architectural-grade glue lamps, no matter where you are in the space.” We just had to ask about the home’s stunning ceilings, which are made out of cedar wood. “Cedar wood, you can purchase it so that it’s got a consistent look to it,” he says. “You don’t see a lot of knots. You don’t see a lot of color variation, and that is typically what you see when people use cedar wood decoratively. We chose to go the other way, and you could see that that cedar wood has this beautiful variation in color and knots and striations that just made for a gorgeous ceiling plane that’s throughout the house, for the most part … The variation that we created with that ceiling plane just adds more energy and excitement to the space.”
The roof of the guest house.
One Impressive Guest House
Another impressive feature? The guest house, which is a geodesic dome or a hemisphere shaped structure made out of interlocking hexagons or triangles. The owner had a childhood obsession with these, which look very futuristic. “The homeowner had, as a young child, actually had a fascination with Buckminster Fuller, who created, designed the geodesic dome. And he had such a fascination with him that he built one at the home that he grew up in in his backyard,” says Paul. The owner “said that someday I would love to have one that I actually can live in. So that was the ideology of the guest house.” The roof is made out of eco-friendly, fire-resistance cork based stucco. It also appears in the back of the home too. The home was constructed from a prefab kit. It took about a week to erect. “The challenging part was the interior trim finishing because each piece of trim had about five different angles that we had to accommodate to make it look right,” says Paul. The trim subcontractor spent days getting the angles just right where multiple windows meet in the guest home.
The home’s guest house, which is shaped like a geodesic dome.
The Backyard
Due to the sloped land the home was situated on, the backyard had to be carved out. Originally, the team thought they’d have to construct a concrete retaining wall. “Once we got in there, and our excavator started hammering away, we found that the soil, the rock, was substantial enough to be self-supporting,” he says. “So we wound up saving right about $100,000 on the retaining wall and got the benefit of a gorgeous natural rock shelf.” One of the home’s defining features was the use of natural materials throughout: wood, marble and rock. Above all, the architect valued the client’s enthusiasm for their home. “This particular client was really a dream client,” he says. “They were just open to ideas. They were fast at making decisions, and they were excited about the process. It’s just a wonderful combination, a wonderful recipe to create wonderful spaces like this. So, they were just really a dream to work with.”
