36-unit Ambiente Creekside in Uptown is local family’s second luxury resort
Two years of construction on the 36-unit Ambiente Creekside resort at 45 Art Barn Road in Uptown is slated to begin shortly after site grading in the first quarter of 2027. The work follows groundskeeping completed before August on the 19.35-acre property.
“What we were doing down there is just cleaning out all the dead brush and mitigating fire risk because there was so much overgrown greenery, dead trees and dead brush,” co-owner Jen May said.
“My grandfather’s old house was down there and there was an old office that was for the Hawkeye Trailer Park that was down there,” she said. “The house was in really bad shape; it was falling apart, and the office that was down there was really not usable for what we’re going to be using the property for. So we got demolition permits from the city, and that’s already [demolished]. So now it’s just keeping everything clean and making sure that there are no fire hazards down there.”
May, who is co-owner along with her sister Colleen TeBrake and their parents, Kathy and Mike Stevenson, said it’s a bit longer of a construction timeline since it’s a family operation, with her family doing all the interior design work and her father helping with construction. The family opened Ambiente Sedona at 900 W. SR 89A in early 2023.
“For us, having a family-owned property and having it kind of be an extension of our family and our personality as a family, you can’t really do that when you hire all of that out,” May said. “You kind of need to have a little bit of your own flavor and touch on everything.”
“I think the more involved we are as a family, [the better], not only in the construction and the design, but the running of the property, too.”
The project totals 83,740 square feet across a 58,290-square-foot footprint, consisting of 33 creekside atrium units totaling 29,040 square feet, a 20,250-square-foot restaurant and grotto, a 16,200-square-foot health spa, a 9,650-square-foot arrival building with three second-level atrium suites, a 5,100-square-foot maintenance building and 3,500 square feet for four apartment units for staff.
The order of construction has not been determined yet “because we have six different pieces of property, we may phase and say we’re going to start the atriums first, and then we’re going to work on the arrivals building,” May said. “Then the restaurant and then the spa. So it might be phased like that, but it will all be constructed within two years.”
The staff apartments will be rent-free for employees for a limited term, according to May.
“The reason we’re [doing] that is that we’re going to be able to hire people that are looking for housing. They can move into that for the short term, anywhere up to six months,” she said. “Our point as a family is, we would rather have them be able to save up for six months and go secure housing somewhere else where they can find a home, and not have to live in an apartment.”
One amenity for the general public is the shared-use path from Owenby Way to Oak Creek that will go through Ambiente Creekside to its southern boundary and has the potential to tie into future city of Sedona Public Works projects, such as a long-discussed crossing over the creek to the Huckaby Trail.
“We’re responsible for the part that comes down onto our property. We will be coming off [State Route] 89A, and it will go down between us and Arroyo Robles’ new development, and then it’ll continue on down to the creek,” May said. “It ends there in a platform without access — it will not have access to the water at the creek until the city gets its side of everything going and connects to it.”
Across Oak Creek in Uptown and unrelated to Ambiente, work crews began clearing the land at 115 Schnebly Hill Road in mid-September for the Senoa Resort & Spa, formerly known as the Oak Creek Heritage Lodge, which is slated to open in late 2028 with 70 guest rooms and four workforce housing units.
Little developable land remains in Sedona, May said, and few other hotels are left to be built. That’s part of her response to residents tired of new hotel projects.
“We’re not just this corporate entity that came in to build a hotel and then turn around and sell it to another corporate entity and walk away,” she said, noting the Stevenson family has been in the Sedona area since the 1950s. “We’re here to own it and run it and oversee it.”
