Posterity 44
407 Loy Lane
Sedona, Arizona · MMXXVI
Posterity 44
407 Loy Lane
Sedona, Arizona · MMXXVI
I
The red rock rises behind the property in long horizontal courses, the same sandstone laid down two hundred and seventy million years ago and weathered, since, into Sedona's familiar amphitheater of mesas and buttes.
The house sits low against this landscape, oriented to receive the morning sun from the east and to hold the long warm afternoon as it moves across Loy Butte to the west. A seasonal creek runs the lower edge of the parcel, hidden inside a corridor of mature cottonwood, Arizona cypress, and Utah juniper that shifts color through the year — pale green in spring, deep summer green by July, gold and rust by November.
The red rock walls north and east of the building envelope are not adjacent to the property. They are part of it. From the upper terraces the layered sandstone faces fill the field of vision; the structure itself reads, from a distance, as a single horizontal volume the land has made room for rather than something set upon it.
The parcel borders the Coconino National Forest. Beyond the property line the land continues without interruption — no second residence visible, no fence — into ponderosa pine, manzanita, and the slow rise toward the Mogollon Rim.
"The red rock country of southern Utah and northern Arizona is a place where the bones of the earth are visible. It does not pretend." Ellen Meloy
II
The interior is organized around a single long axis, the principal rooms placed in sequence to receive light through the course of a day and the turn of a year.
The main residence is a multi-wing composition of warm tan stucco, hand-cut sandstone, and dark-stained timber, capped in standing-seam metal that has been allowed to weather to a quiet charcoal. The roof line is pitched and gabled rather than flat — a vocabulary that reads as lodge before it reads as estate, and which gives the building the kind of soft horizontal silhouette that holds its own against the surrounding rock without competing for attention.
The great room reaches sixteen feet at the ridge. A full-height fieldstone fireplace rises the entire wall and anchors the volume; on the opposite side, a wall of charcoal-framed glass opens onto a covered terrace and the view beyond. Wide-plank wire-brushed oak runs throughout the principal floor, finished warm and unbleached. The kitchen is generous and dark-cabineted, with a stone island long enough to seat six.
Six bedrooms are distributed across the wings, each with its own bath and most with private outdoor access. The primary suite occupies the western end and opens onto a private courtyard with an outdoor stone fireplace of its own. A self-contained casita with its own kitchen and living room sits at the eastern edge of the compound, joined to the main residence by a covered breezeway. A three-bay garage, sized for full-length vehicles and off-road equipment, completes the plan.
What the house refuses to do is pose. Its restraint — the absence of cantilever, of flourish, of obvious gesture — is the quality that lets the landscape register first.
IV
Loy Lane runs west from State Route 89A into the red rock country above Sedona, climbing slowly through juniper and manzanita until the pavement narrows and the canyon opens.
The immediate setting is Loy Butte and the long western ridge that closes the upper Verde Valley. The property sits at the threshold of the Red Rock–Secret Mountain Wilderness, a quarter-million acres of federal land that runs from the back of Loy Canyon north to the Mogollon Rim. There is no through-road. Beyond the property line the land belongs to the forest.
Sedona proper is fifteen minutes east — the galleries, the trailheads at Boynton and Doe Mountain, the table at Elote, the Sunday market at Tlaquepaque. Cottonwood and the Verde Valley wine country lie twenty minutes south. Phoenix Sky Harbor is just over two hours; Flagstaff and the southern rim of the Grand Canyon are within easy reach for a day.
The seasons here are real and they are mild. Summer mornings are dry and cool; afternoons sometimes carry monsoon. Autumn is long and gold along the creek lines. Winter delivers occasional dusting on the rock without ever closing the road. Spring arrives early, in green grass and cottonwood leaf, and it is the season the property remembers most clearly.
Within the Landscape
V
VI
Viewings are arranged privately, by appointment. The undersigned is pleased to make the introduction.