In a state abounding with spectacular red rocks, Red Mountain is stunning enough to stop even the most jaded viewers in their tracks. Overlooking the city of Ivins in southwest Utah, Red Mountain has a flat top and cliffs as tall as 1,600 feet on three of its sides, which perhaps makes it more mesa than mountain. However, it is undeniably, emphatically red.

The mountain’s appearance changes throughout the day as the sun sweeps shadows across the textured Navajo sandstone. Down Red Mountain’s eastern slope is Tuacahn Center for the Arts and its famous amphitheater. Just east of that is Snow Canyon State Park, a place so beautiful that locals say it would be a national park if it were located anywhere besides natural wonder-glutted southern Utah.

On the other side of Red Mountain is Kayenta, a housing development within Ivins city limits. The heart of the community is the Kayenta Art Village, filled with art galleries, studios, a restaurant and a state-of-the-art theater.

Nearly 600 homes surround the art village, yet driving on the main thoroughfare, Kayenta Parkway, hardly any of them are visible – and that’s the whole point. Kayenta is a rare place where the built environment is completely subservient to the natural landscape.

Kayenta founder Terry Marten has still never quite figured out why he lost control of his truck on Thanksgiving Day 1971. The air was misty, and there was ice on the road as he headed west on Old Highway 91 near Ivins, but he was used to those conditions – he regularly drove this stretch on the way to Brian Head, where he was building housing developments in the early days of the ski resort.

As Terry went over a slight dip in the road, his truck “got squirrely.” The vehicle left the road, then rolled onto its side near a dirt embankment. Unhurt, he climbed out of the passenger-side window.

“I fought my way up the side of the bank,” he said. “As I did, the sun came out, and it was beautiful. I looked at Red Mountain and pinched myself.” He wanted to make sure he truly had survived the crash.

Some motorists soon stopped to see that he was all right, then went to summon help. As Terry waited, he stared transfixed at Red Mountain, which seemed to radiate in the sunlight. By the time the police arrived 40 minutes later, he had determined that someday he would build a community on the land in front of the mountain.

The land wasn’t for sale, but he kept his eye on it. Five years later, in 1976, he purchased nearly 2,000 acres when it became available. However, he didn’t start building Kayenta that year. Or the next. He didn’t build the first home until 1982, and he built just one home in each of the next two years.

“I thought the site was so beautiful, it should be as untouched as possible,” Terry said.

To do that, he devised ways to make the homes in Kayenta merge seamlessly into the landscape. All structures are low to the ground, nestled into the earth. Only native vegetation may be planted; 75 percent of all property must be kept in its natural state. And all houses must use colors that blend into the natural environment.

As building started to pick up in the 1990s, Terry recruited his architect son, Matt Marten, to design homes, each of which is custom-made to complement the landscape of its specific lot.

Finding colors to camouflage houses into the scenery isn’t as easy as simply matching the color of the local dirt, he said.

“The earth here is bright orange,” Matt said. “Looking at the desert, you actually see more sagebrush and a little bit of earth color that pops through.” When the silvery green sage mixes with the red-orange soil, the result is a warm neutral shade. As Matt described it, “We have six colors to pick from, and they’re all brown.”

The Kayenta home designs and color palette makes the community all but invisible when gazing at Red Mountain. The effect is even more pronounced at night – because Kayenta has no streetlights, the only light comes from the moon and stars.

Not everyone who lives in Kayenta is an artist, though it sometimes feels that way, considering the heart of the community is the Kayenta Art Village. Like so many things in Kayenta, the art village emerged organically, bit by bit, over the course of decades.

Art seems to be in the air at Kayenta – or, more specifically, on the wind. It’s difficult to go far without seeing one of Lyman Whitaker’s copper wind sculptures spinning in the breeze. At the Whitaker Studio in the art village, the artist’s team makes each piece by hand according to Whitaker’s designs, then ships them to galleries around the world.

Whitaker conceived of his signature
artistic style in Kayenta in the 1980s, when he had a studio that neighbored Terry’s office.

“He’d built his first wind sculpture, and he was out there watching it spin in the yard,”
Terry said. When he came over to ask Whitaker about it, the artist was excited about his creation but wondered whether anyone would buy it.

“Do you think you could get $200 for it?” Whitaker asked.

“You never know,” Terry said. “You might be able to.”

Today, Whitaker’s most elaborate wind sculptures sell for $5,000 or more.

Whitaker Studio is closed to the public, but its work is for sale at Datura Gallery, the first gallery that opened in Kayenta. Near the gallery, about a dozen wind sculptures spin outside Xetava Gardens Cafe, the restaurant that kickstarted the art village.

Xetava was built in 1999 by Dan Pettegrew, who opened it as a little place to sell plants, books and coffee. The interior was built in circular, kiva-like fashion. In the center of the main room, Pettegrew constructed a stone monolith he called the Mother Earth Rock, constructed from 11 separate stones taken from the base of Red Mountain. Xetava’s unusual name – pronounced “zay-TAH-vuh” – is a combination of “xeriscape” and “lava,” referring to Kayenta’s distinctive landscaping.

It wasn’t until Greg Federman bought Xetava in 2006 that its menu branched out very far from coffee. Even then, the menu was limited, as there was no kitchen; Federman did what he could with a microwave, waffle maker, a small pizza oven and a couple of toaster ovens.

The rudimentary setup and relatively isolated location didn’t seem like an obvious recipe for success to the lawyer who helped Federman purchase the place. He still remembers the lawyer’s incredulity when trying to wrap his head around the scheme.

“Let me get this straight,” Federman recalled the lawyer saying. “You have no savings; you’re taking an equity line on your house; you have no equipment for a restaurant – there is no storage or refrigerators … what are you doing? You’re in the middle of nowhere with no advertising budget. How do you plan to make money?”

“I don’t know,” Federman replied. “It just seems like there should be a restaurant here.”

Federman’s hunch turned out to be right. It took five years before he made a profit, but Xetava eventually became Kayenta’s go-to gathering place. In time, he was able to build an actual kitchen and expand the dining room. The menu grew, thanks in part to suggestions from the customers. Federman now owns Xetava’s entire building and recently opened an electric-bike rental shop downstairs from the restaurant.

The art village sprang up around Xetava. Though it’s hard to see it now, many galleries were built in converted RV garages. At Datura, Juniper Sky, Gallery 873 and others, people can buy fine oil paintings, ceramics, jewelry and more.

With the visual and culinary arts covered, Terry’s next step was to build a center for the performing arts. He discussed his hopes with actress Jan Broberg, who was living in nearby Santa Clara. Broberg had extensive experience in film, TV and the stage – she played Maria in The Sound of Music at Tuacahn – and gave him detailed recommendations on how she would set up a small, intimate theater.

Broberg didn’t hear from Terry for nearly 10 years. Then, in January 2017, he invited her to meet him at Xetava but didn’t tell her why. He took her over to a new building with a sign reading, “Center for the Arts at Kayenta.” He had built the theater she had described all those years ago and offered her a job as its director.

It was an emotional moment for Broberg as he gave her a tour of the new Center for the Arts. When he showed her the women’s restroom, fitted with seven stalls, Broberg began to cry. Terry was perplexed by her reaction.

“Isn’t that what you told me?” he asked. “You said, ‘To get 200 women through a 15-minute intermission, you have to have seven stalls.’ ”

“Yeah,” Broberg said, “but nobody ever listens to me.”

“Well, I did,” Marten said. “I wrote down everything you talked about.”

The mission of the theater is to put on plays, musicals and events of the professional quality found at Tuacahn but to branch out into more challenging subject matters. Recent productions have included Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Full Monty. Renowned Utah composer Kurt Bestor puts on an intimate Christmas performance each year, and the theater hosts national touring acts like the Three Redneck Tenors.

Because Kayenta’s residents include so many people who have retired after long, distinguished careers, the Center for the Arts’ lecture series has plenty of expert speakers to draw upon. Recently, the former director of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory Planetarium, who lives in Kayenta, gave talks on the planet Mercury and the Mars rover. In May, the center will put on its second annual Festival of the Americas with performers and vendors from indigenous cultures.

Though Kayenta began more than 45 years ago, only about a quarter of the land has been developed. That is astoundingly slow growth compared to typical housing developments, which are often completely built in a couple of years. That pace is deliberate, Matt said. For him and his dad, doing things right always trumps doing things fast.

“We don’t take it for granted that this unspoiled landscape will always be here,” he said. “You can ruin it really easily.”

He works with each new resident to design their house specifically to their wishes, while also ensuring the home meshes perfectly with its surroundings. The Martens take such care because they feel it is the right thing to do, but also because they will have to live with the results.

Both of the Martens live in Kayenta, so wherever Matt goes, he meets people who live in homes he created. If he’s not careful, that can mean he’s always on the clock. To prevent that, his friends have instituted a policy of not bringing up business during social occasions; if someone has an issue with their house they’d like to discuss, they know to set an official appointment.

It is rare for a developer to be so personally invested in a community, Matt said. Many developers swoop in from out of state, build as many homes as they can in the least amount of time, then leave. Because the landscape is the reason many people want to live in southeast Utah, he said, it doesn’t make sense to wreck that landscape. The Martens are committed to making sure their landscape isn’t wrecked.

At the rate Kayenta is being built, it will be 130 years or so before all available land is developed. Neither Terry nor Matt envisions being around that long, and they have no other family members able to take over for them. There will come a time, sooner or later, that they will have to transfer stewardship of Kayenta to new hands.

When the Martens eventually have to sell Kayenta, they hope to find a buyer willing to follow their original vision. But the community members themselves have embraced that vision so deeply, and the results have been so profoundly positive, that it is hard to imagine residents accepting anything that strays from the Kayenta way of living lightly, and artistically, on the land.