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A new resort with a colorful past reconnects with its spectacular views.
By Jonathan Ringen
December 2002
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The new casitas (above and below left) are inspired by the
midcentury architecture that houses the restaurant (below right).
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The Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain was planned so that views are
aligned with the Praying Monk rock formation (above).
Top: James L. Christy. Middle, left: James L. Christy. Middle, right:
Westroc Hospitality. Bottom: Allen + Philp Architects.
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From the airplane window during a bumpy descent into Phoenix's Sky Harbor
International Airport (the turbulence, the captain explains, is caused by
rising heat columns radiating off the Sonoran Desert), the city below appears
as undifferentiated low-rise sprawl. Little more than downtown's office
towers, basketball arena, and baseball stadium stand out, which makes Camelback
Mountain--the granite-and-red-rock peak that is the city's most prominent
landmark--some of the most beloved real estate in Phoenix.
Perched high on Camelback's west slope is a handsome midcentury building
with a low flat roof, stone walls, and wide expanses of window. A local
architect named Hiram Hudson Benedict designed the building in 1955 as the
clubhouse of a tennis retreat being built by a group of Hollywood investors,
including Charlie Chaplin's son, Sydney, and B-movie star John Ireland.
Like most modern architecture in the Phoenix area--home to Taliesin West--the
structure is usually described as Wrightian. But though its sensitive siting
and use of local organic materials reveal an undeniable Wright influence,
elements like the building's walls of steel-framed glass are more closely
aligned with Mies's International Style.
After a renovation last year the building was transformed into a restaurant
called Elements, which is part of Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, a new
resort nestled into the side of the hill. The complex also includes a 12,000-square-foot
spa and 49 casitas, small houses that contain two hotel rooms each.
(Only 12 of the casitas, those downhill from the clubhouse, are new;
the rest, built in the 1970s, dot the hillside above it.)
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The property that Sanctuary occupies was a tennis club that had seen better
days. The new resort buildings (above) are sited where some of the courts
used to be (below right). The clubhouse building (visible at the left in the
pictures) has been renovated to become the resort's restaurant, bar, and
reception area (below left).
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In the casitas (above) simple building materials--like the bare
concrete used for the floors--are contrasted with high-quality
furniture, fixtures, and fittings.
Top & bottom: James L. Christy. Middle, right: Michael Norton.
Middle, left: Allen + Philp.
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For most of its history the club--named the Paradise Valley Racquet club
in the 1950s, and John Gardiner's Tennis Ranch in the 1960s and '70s--was
a glamorous place. It hosted celebrity tournaments with participants like
Jimmy Durante and Dean Martin, and Australian tennis champion Ken Rosewall
built a house there with a swimming pool and a tennis court on the roof.
When Republican iconoclast Barry Goldwater led a movement to preserve Camelback
Mountain in the late 1960s, the club donated its undeveloped uphill land
to the preserve, ensuring that nothing would ever be built above it. But
by all accounts the property was in sorry shape by the time its current
management, Westroc Hospitality, first looked at it in 1999. "The
restaurant was run down, the landscaping overgrown--there had been a lot
of deferred maintenance," Westroc principal Scott Lyon says. "It
was kind of a dog," agrees Steve Martino, the project's landscape architect.
"But it was a great site."
Mark Philp, Sanctuary's architect and principal of local firm Allen
+ Philp, is a friendly guy who looks pretty much the way you'd hope an Arizona
architect would look, with a big gray mustache and long hair pulled back
into a ponytail. Over lunch at Elements he pulls out a three-ring binder
labeled "Gimme Shelter" that contains drawings and notes documenting
his work (along with that of senior designer Jonathan Heilman) on the resort.
"When we first came out here we noticed you'd walk through the tennis
courts and because of their orientation you'd have incredible views of this
mountain," he says. A decision was made to take 11 of the club's 17
tennis courts and resculpt the land to site the spa, an "infinite
edge" swimming pool, and the 12 new casitas. Lyon says: "We
allocated the new buildings to the tennis courts uppermost on the hill that
had views nobody was appreciating while playing tennis."
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