Forty steel piers rise from a restored ancient waterway in Sedona's Red Rock Country, each supporting one of the 40 bronze-tinted glass cubes that together form Ambiente, a Landscape Hotel — North America's first landscape hotel, which arrived in 2023. Designed by ASUL Architects of Phoenix alongside Stephen Thompson of Architect Studio in Scottsdale, with landscape work by Krizan Associates of San Diego, the project's central commitment is one of elevation rather than imposition: the 576-square-foot atriums hover above the land rather than disrupting it, allowing the ancient creek corridor beneath to continue its ecological work undisturbed. From above, the weathered Cor-Ten-toned cladding and dark steel framing cause the buildings to nearly dissolve into the juniper and pinyon pine canopy, the red sandstone buttes of Cathedral Rock and Courthouse Mesa rising beyond. Inside, the design logic stays consistent. Corner-wrapped floor-to-ceiling glazing frames the red rock panorama as something closer to a living painting than a window view, while live-edge walnut tables, linen sectionals in warm sand tones, and hand-applied textural wallcoverings in muted ochre and ash keep the palette earthbound. The restaurant, Forty1, extends the mood with channeled leather banquettes, exposed wood-beam ceilings, and brass-accented dining chairs — a room that suggests a serious kitchen has arrived in the high desert without announcing itself too loudly. The freeform pool terrace, ringed with concrete fire bowls and low-slung loungers, completes a property that treats landscape not as backdrop but as the fundamental material.

2hr drive from Phoenix airport (PHX)

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