Arizona Foothills Magazine

True enough, although Birrittella and McLean have different internal expressions as well. As their architectural designer (and Birrittella’s niece), Melissa Wechsler, notes, McLean was concerned with creating spaces for specific activities like yoga and meditation whereas Birrittella, who also meditates daily, considered resale practicalities like having two master suites and a three-car garage. “Focusing on the car and how that’s going to get in there wasn’t what Sarah was all about,” Wechsler concedes. “So what I tried to do was take the spaces that she was asking for and figure out how they could fit into a more typical housing model.”

But of course their resulting house is anything but typical, a fact largely due to the intimacy McLean, Birrittella and Wechsler all enjoyed with the site. (Their home is picturesquely nestled into the Coconino National Forest and U.S. Wilderness Area.) The couple’s previous home was just a mile away, so they’d had ample time to connect with the land—something you can’t avoid in Sedona, McLean notes—and think about which residential changes were in order. This was especially true for McLean, who moved into Birrittella’s home when they married and found the open floor plan more conducive to cacophony than conjugal felicity. “My husband’s a big college football fan,” she laughs. “I lived for years in a monastery…So the doors, the doors—they’re very important!”

Even Washington-based Wechsler knew the land: She’d spent the summer of 2001 in Birrittella’s old house, sketching homes for some property he’d purchased. (None were ever built.) When she finished graduate school and was preparing to move to Miami, Fla. a few years later, Birrittella invited her to come to Sedona en route and design a home for him and Sarah. “I was willing to roll the dice,” Birrittella says of his decision to hire the freshly minted Wechsler, “and when [people] come up to the house, they just can’t believe that, literally, this was the first house she ever designed that somebody built.”

“It was a pretty intense experience,” Wechsler adds, “because I was only there for about two months, and to design a 6,000-sq.-ft. house and get it drawn up and ready for permit that quickly without very much experience was pretty challenging.” Wechsler approached it without ego, seeing herself as the “instrument” that would coordinate the couple’s ideas into a sound design. “It’s kind of created like a big cave,” she explains, “where the central gathering space (the big living room) has 13-foot ceilings; and it’s flanked on the south and on the north by two wings of the house that are lower and tighter and held to the ground.” The design smacks of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work often incorporated a similar sense of anticipation and reward. In this case, the two wings act as runways that exhale into the voluminous group-meditation living room. Of course, the fact that McLean and Birrittella have a group-meditation living room at all is probably noteworthy itself.

Like the front walkway and back patio, that living room is paved with flagstone quarried in Ash Fork, Ariz. (Flagstone was also used on an interior wall and at the entry.) This rock unifies the project’s interior and exterior components, and it connects the home with its site. “You’re always inside, outside,” Birrittella observes, “and I think…it makes it very conducive to get into meditation because of that…You feel like you’re part of nature.”

Accordingly, the exterior stucco was painted a gentle moss color. This, Wechsler and Birrittella agree, helps the home blend in with the surrounding cypresses and foliage. And in the kitchen, a cork floor is as easy on the body—and the dishes—as the exterior color is on the eyes. This is particularly important for McLean, who has been known to cook for as many as 100 people. (Her time at the monastery, where she cooked three vegetarian meals a day for up to 50 people, served as indirect training.)

For all their contemplation and discussion, the couple still encountered a few surprises from their home, the most notable being Birrittella’s library, which he lovingly compares to a cave. “When we were first designing that space,” he says, “I was thinking, well this isn’t going to be so great, because that’s one of the rooms in the house that doesn’t have an unbelievable view coming from it.” What happened was in fact quite the opposite. From the library you can look through the double doors, the courtyard and the living room to see one of the home’s most expansive views.

Much as Wechsler served as the pen for McLean’s and Birrittella’s desires, she imbued the home with a few thumbprints of her own, most notably along the front walkway, where a wall of windows to the south looks into one of the home’s corridors. That corridor was then designed to be like a gallery wall for displaying artworks, so that visitors can see art as they approach the home, not just when they’re inside.

Unlike many other custom-home owners, McLean and Birrittella don’t consider this a mini-fortress built solely for their enjoyment. Instead, they let people use their home for special occasions in return for donations to organizations like The Humane Society of Sedona. They also routinely host fund-raisers for environmentally concerned politicians. “One of our main focuses is who’s really out there taking care of the environment,” Birrittella says. “We’ll

get behind anybody who’s doing that.”

The home also functions as a meditation space for others. Among her many titles, McLean is the director of the Sedona Meditation Training Company, and she hosts silent group meditations every equinox and solstice. “That’s really the main thing that we use that living room for unless we’re having some sort of fund-raiser [or] retreat,” she says. It’s a tradition that both honors nature and symbolizes the home’s essence. For, just as a person is more than their labels (businessman, artist, philanthropist) might suggest, so too does this home transcend its stucco and stone to be a vital force in the dialogue between self and nature.