Your New Favorite Airbnb—Sedona Domes!

On the edge of Sedona, Arizona, greeting travelers driving the Red Rock Scenic Byway, is Sedona Domes, created originally as “Xanadu of Sedona” in the early 90s. The Arizonan landmark has a new life and identity given to it by its current owners, Laura Lee and Paul Robear. The couple updated the historic Monolithic Dome home and share it with others via their highly-rated, popular Airbnb.

“Sedona Domes has its own demands,” Laura Lee Robear said. “As owners and residents, we must listen and dress it up, live in and share with it, sculpt it to our needs with white, clean lines. It’s a lovely process and a three-way relationship.”

The Airbnb website says this rental is rated 4.95—Guest Favorite! It says Sedona Domes is “One of the most loved homes on Airbnb based on ratings, reviews, and reliability.” There are over 650 glowing reviews from happy guests.

Two of the ten Monolithic Domes have been transformed into the private Airbnb apartment. One of the two domes is the Great Dome, the largest dome of the house at 36 feet in diameter. The second guest dome is the tallest, with a height of 32 feet at the apex. The Great Dome features an 8-foot-long electric fireplace, a sunken living room, a 12.5-foot sofa, and a Steinway grand piano.

“We had a group of composers here from Los Angeles, and they loved the acoustics,” Paul said. “They stayed here for four days composing music together, enjoying the way the sound reverberates and expands throughout the Dome.”

Paul and Laura Lee said that their visitors tend to be imaginative creators. Their guests have included families from all over the world, with a wide range of occupations and interests, including architects and architecture students who enjoy the unusual structure. Paul recounted a time when he had explained the construction of the domes to a man who turned out to be an architect for the Beijing Opera House. He further reported that everyone, especially kids, comment with surprise and delight on the unusual acoustics. Musicians of many genres will bring out their instruments to experiment with the dome’s unique acoustics, including the focal effect at its center that amplifies sound and the whisper-effect at the edges that conveys sound from one side of the dome to the other.

“The uniqueness and power of the domes tend to draw people who literally think outside the box,” Paul said. “We love to share this special place. It’s our joy. Sedona Domes has enriched our lives with new possibilities, new pleasures.”

Each of the ten domes functions differently for the home as a whole. In addition to the Great Dome and the entry dome, which make up the Airbnb, the eight remaining domes house the dining room, kitchen, office, second office, primary bedroom, primary bath, utility and laundry, and theater. The domes form a circle around a central courtyard, which Laura Lee and Paul consider their 11th room.

“I am always quoting Winston Churchill on this: ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,’” Laura Lee said. “It’s been fun to see how this plays out in our dome experience.”

Sedona Domes rests on 3.63 acres of land, with a parking lot accommodating up to 20 vehicles. Paul has created a labyrinth on a special part of the land, encircled by large stones measuring nine feet tall. He likes to call it Domehenge, a signature part of the property reflecting the scale of the house.

“We follow the cues in the architecture itself,” Laura Lee said. “We love the architecture, something beautiful, pristine. Nature’s first housing for so many creatures is the egg, with its economical, spare shape. Nature builds in curves, and so we’re in alignment with these natural principles.”

These Monolithic Domes have been an iconic landmark on the outskirts of Sedona since their inception in 1993. They were known as the Easter Eggs when painted in rainbow colors by former owners Bracken Cherry and Nina Joy, and they were painted dark gray while owned by lawyer Alan Isaacman, who successfully argued the famous 1988 free speech case, Hustler magazine v. Falwell, before the Supreme Court. Now, the house is painted a pristine, clean white, to the joy of the original owner, Ken Johnson.

“Ken is the designer and visionary for these domes,” Laura Lee said. “We are just lucky to be in the sequence of owners, and we share with Ken his delight in introducing domes to the general public.”

Through county records, Laura Lee researched who had built Sedona Domes. She found Ken Johnson living around the corner, and they became good friends.

“Ken has been an invaluable source of history and advice,” Laura Lee said.

Ken Johnson and his brother, Dale, dreamed of building domes to show a futuristic way of living. They had seen a Xanadu Dome in the Wisconsin Dells, one of three built across the country as homes of the future. Those domes no longer exist, but the Johnson brothers chose a different construction method: the Monolithic Dome, which Monolithic Constructors, Inc. of Italy, Texas, promoted.

“We wanted to show people a better way of living and teach them to get away from living in square boxes,” Ken said. “Monolithic Constructors sent a couple of semi trucks with a lot of equipment and put the foundation into the designed shape of the buildings.”

Dave South, the oldest son of David B. South, co-inventor of the Monolithic Dome, designed the layout and Airforms, and two men from Poland (Jan Pregowski and Henryk Gawel) who worked with Monolithic, got the construction going. The Johnsons decided to call their creation “Xanadu of Sedona.”

“My brother and I were our own general contractors,” Ken said. “I built 30 houses in the Sedona area in 15 years, so we were ready to do a lot of the work ourselves.”

The heating and air conditioning ducts are underneath the buildings down into the ground. The Monolithic crew attached the Airforms, sprayed three inches of polyurethane foam inside, and then laid a ten-inch grid of #3 rebar throughout the domes from floor to ceiling.

“They used a machine that could shoot concrete at high speed, so it compacts strong, with three inches of gunite on the inside of that foam,” Ken said. “You could not put a dent in those domes with a bomb. On the outside, we built it to earthquake zone five, the highest in the country.

"Heating, air conditioning ducts, and electricity are all underground,” he continued. “The well is 700 feet deep and pumps at five gallons a minute, and we had a septic tank. We had to have it all planned, with so much underneath the ground—the footings, the trenches, the septic tank, all the plumbing.”

Once complete, Xanadu of Sedona became an attraction, as Ken chose the location for maximum visibility. Driving up from Phoenix, visitors enter Sedona via the Red Rock Scenic Byway (State Route 179) and look directly at the Domes, which rise just above the juniper trees. When a news show arrived, Ken and his brother painted a big smiley face on one of the domes as a welcome.

“The county would not allow advertising,” Ken said. “It had to advertise itself.”

Ken Johnson sold Xanadu of Sedona to Bracken Cherry and Nina Joy, who raised three daughters there and painted a rainbow of colors on the domes. The domes became famous and were featured on many shows, including MTV’s “Extreme Cribs,” The Travel Channel’s “Amazing Vacation Homes,” HGTV’s “World’s Most Extreme Homes, and more.

When Laura Lee and Paul Robear took ownership, they emphasized acoustics and serenity. They opted for a clean white exterior and changed the name from Xanadu of Sedona to Sedona Domes. They no longer open the domes for public tours, but many Airbnb guests have had the opportunity to enjoy the soothing, relaxing energy of the round house.

Sedona Domes still attracts attention and was recently featured in a story about Sedona in Men’s Journal.

“The five-star Airbnb landmark is exquisitely furnished with sunken sofas, spiral stairs leading to a loft, a fireplace, and a grand piano,” said David Young in his article, “The Perfect 3-Day Weekend in Sedona: Canyon Rides, Hidden Vineyards, and Red Rock Bliss.” He wrote, “Safe to say, there’s no other place in the Southwest quite like this distinctive lodging smack in the middle of red rock country.”

The Robears removed the fountain in the Great Dome and replaced it with a long fireplace. They upgraded connectors between the Domes and designed and built a unique, 12-foot-long sofa with a curved back.

“We like these elliptic curves,” Laura Lee said. “It’s a chance to get creative. We love the soaring feelings of the tall, tall ceilings. Being here feels like being embraced and connected to nature, with loving arms enclosing us.”