Mark Megahan
Thousands of years before Glendon Good arrived in Sedona, Arizona, the ancient Anasazi chose to build their homes high up a cliff. Good has been living that way his entire life, beginning with his childhood in California. That home faced the sea where this one faces the red rocks of Arizona’s high country but both were 200 feet straight up. That gives him good cause to believe his nine-month-old son won’t “be afraid of heights,” either. His wife loves him enough to put up with the ski-lift style tram gondola which shuttles them up and down.
Life atop a 200 foot cliff
It takes a little over three minutes for the tram gondola to climb the cliff on cables strung at an angle of just a little more than 45 degrees.
Good shares the home with his wife, Milenka Bezic, and their son Jackson. When they met at a neighbor’s party, his project was already three quarters done.
He picked up the 5-acre parcel in 1999 for a bargain at $262,500, which is definitely a steal for property in Sedona. The vertical terrain had something to do with that. “No one thought you could build on the cliff.” Good’s mama taught him well. “His father, Robert Good, was a physician and his mother, Elaine Marinoff, a homemaker in the process of becoming an artist. That process involved divorcing his father.”
Mom fell in love with “the top of a nearly-200-foot cliff facing the ocean in Pacific Palisades.” It was affordable “because nobody thought you could build on it,” Good says, “which is precisely what he said about his own site.”
Doing the lion’s share of work himself saved him a bundle on construction costs but he still paid roughly $540 a square foot. There’s another home with his work studio at the bottom of the cliff. Overall, he relates, “building the house and the 900-foot studio cost about $1.65 million.” The biggest challenges were related to the tram. It was custom designed and the builder called it the “steepest” they ever built.
Workers didn’t want to do the high wire act to string cables and Good had to prep the rock face for a track by hand. Then he had to convince the fire Marshall that it was big enough to hold a wheelchair in case they ever needed to rescue someone up there. The entire house is wheelchair friendly for that very reason.
Rust-colored steel
The facade is entirely steel and virtually all of it is rust-colored, to harmonize with the Sedona rocks. Water comes from a well on the property dipping 360 feet below the parking lot. It’s pumped to a 2,500-gallon tank atop the cliff. The solar panels generally produce an excess which they sell to the power company.
On cloudy days, they buy some back. If the grid goes down, they still have an emergency back up generator powered by propane. All the “grey” water from sinks and showers goes to irrigation while blackwater waste from toilets goes to a septic system.
While an avid climber who’s been all over his own personal cliff wall, Good “also built a system of connected ladders, which he says he has climbed hundreds of times, often with a backpack full of tools.”
“The aluminum ladders, which he made himself, allow him to travel up or down without entering neighbors’ property or the adjacent Coconino National Forest, something he has to do on each of his seven trails.”
Highlights of his “ultracontemporary,” really split level home are the spaciously combined living-dining-kitchen area with Wolf stove and Viking oven. That “opens onto a cantilevered terrace which, if it wasn’t already terrifying enough, is enclosed by a low (40-inch) wall made entirely of glass.” There is plenty of room for guests
“Two bedroom suites flank the main living space. The primary bedroom, a level below the living room, is reached by a round capsule-like elevator.” There is also a “a large rooftop deck,” all the more impressive with views from the top of a cliff.
