The owners of a large parcel of private land in West Sedona filed an application to have the property, which is currently zoned single-family residential, rezoned as high-density multifamily on Dec. 16.
The Madole-Rigby House, built in 1948, sits on 9.8 acres divided into two assessor’s parcels behind the Windsong Mobile Home Park and adjacent to the Safeway shopping center.
While the rezoning application states that the house is ineligible for listing as a historic landmark due to renovations made in 2001, in September 2010, the city of Sedona’s Historic Preservation Commission identified the Madole-Rigby House, as the very first house designed by future notable architect Howard Madole, as one of Sedona’s most endangered places. “The Madole-Rigby House may be the oldest remaining adobe house in Sedona,” the commission observed at the time.
“I have a lot of fond memories from when we were building it,” Madole said in a Feb. 27, 2009 Sedona Red Rock News interview. “My parents lived in a little cottage above the house and every day for lunch my mother made us sandwiches and fresh lemonade.”
Madole and his family built the house with their own hands over a two-year period, not only laying the adobes but making the bricks themselves out of the property’s red earth with the aid of a mechanical mixer and a 50-gallon drum. One of the fireplaces in the house was handcarved by Hopi craftsman Emerson Maningha.
Two years after its completion, Madole sold the house to writers Elizabeth and Douglas Rigby. Elizabeth Rigby covered and photographed local events for the Sedona Red Rock News from the 1960s through the 1980s; her archives are now held by the Sedona Heritage Museum. Douglas Rigby was a recurring contributor to journals including The American Scholar on such topics as “Dictators and the Gentle Art of Collecting.”
Fellow Sedona writer James Bishop recounted in 2013 how Rigby “loved to tell visitors at the Rainbow Inn saloon that planet earth, with all its wars, tyrants, dictators, half-wit politicians, crooks and gamblers, battle-hungry generals, was here for the simple reason that the gods needed something to amuse them, so easily bored they can be from time to time.”
After the deaths of the Rigbys, the property came into the hands of the Sedona Christian Fellowship, which sold it to the Pacific Southwest District of the Wesleyan Church in 1999. The Wesleyans resold the house in October 2015 to James Spindelman and Soo Young Kim, the current owners.
In exchange for the rezoning, Spindelman and Kim have offered the city a deed restriction on short-term rental use of any units built on the site that will run for a period of 15 years.
“At this time a site plan or development plan is not proposed,” the application stated. “The purpose of this zone change is to create an additional 9.8 acres of high-density multifamily zoning for future multifamily developments.”
The traffic generation statement included with the application, dated Sept. 10, stated that traffic patterns were calculated “for the proposed development based on a total of 200 apartment dwelling units,” and concluded that a 196-unit development would create an average of 1,292 trips per day.
A date for the Planning and Zoning Commission to consider the rezoning application has not yet been set.
