Meet Jennifer May and Colleen TeBrake.

Q: Please tell us what you are up to, and what we can anticipate from your project?

Jennifer: We are building the Ambiente, a landscape hotel in Sedona.  It’s a 40 room Atrium-style hotel, which means the rooms are literally half glass and half steel. We actually like to say it’s like bringing Sedona on IMAX into your room so the focal point becomes the beauty and the scenery of Sedona. The property also includes the Adobe Jack trailhead, which a lot of local people don’t know. We’re going to maintain and take care of the seven public parking spaces that are there now and will still be open to the public. We are also going to put a public restroom at the trailhead for the public to use. I think our guests are going to absolutely love coming straight out of their Atriums to go hiking and mountain biking for exercise. Our motto is: Comepark your car and never get back in it until you are ready to leave the property andhead back home! We have a small fleet of electric vehicles that are going to be for rent that you can drive in the bike lane. They are small trike-sized vehicles, but are also fully enclosed and can go about 50 miles on one charge. Guests can go shopping and to different restaurants if they want without ever having to get back in their car!

Colleen: All of our Atriums also have rooftop decks for stargazing. 

Q: What’s the name of your group?

Jennifer: We named our hotel and management company “Two Sister Bosses”. A little family joke, our dad says we should have called it “Two Bossy Sisters”, which he’s probably correct about. I think our little brother would agree,ha-ha! We are planning to run this hotel and manage it as a family. We are long-time Sedona locals and we care about Sedona and our local community. We care about the stewardship of the land and we want to offer it as a way for other people to come experience Sedona, but also not impact our locals in a negative way either, which is why we bought the fleet of eTrikes for our guests to use.

Q: What kind of food are you going to offer at the restaurant?

Jennifer: We’re working on that right now. We hired local Chef Lindsey Dale to work with us. She’s been with us for quite a while already and has been working on our menu featuring Modern American Cuisine, using as much local farm-to-table fresh ingredients as possible.  

Q: Will the outside public be able to use the restaurant?

Jennifer: Not at this point. We are very limited on parking for the entire property. I think we will be staying fairly full with the amount of interest and publicity we’ve been getting. At least we’re hoping for high occupancy! We may open a table or two once in a while to provide a special guest experience to come and see the resort and sample the menu.

Q: What inspired or led you to get involved with this project?

Jennifer: It’s kind of an interesting story. Our parents, Kathy and Mike Stevenson, actually owned the old Red Rock Lodge in Oak Creek Canyon when we were two and three years old. They had bought it in 1974 just before the oil embargo hit, and it happened to bea year that Flagstaff had one of its worst winters ever. A lot of travel just shut down that year an no one wanted to rent any rooms. Our mom cleaned the rooms and would take my sister and me in tow from room to room. Dad was renting the rooms and did the maintenance and management of this tiny little hotel. This tiny hotel was their first experience in hospitality way back then! After that we packed up and moved to California. In 1982 our parents started a little company called Mold in Graphics. By 1985 the company was growing so rapidly they wanted to move back to Sedona before it became too large to move. Upon our return they bought an industrial building on Shelby Drive. By 1992 the business was exploding and we built a large industrial building in Clarkdale to handle the expansion. In 2012 we started a sister company called Polyfuze. We now have several buildings on the Clarkdale campus and employ about 85 people. During this time all of us three kids have raised our families here. Our brother Matt took over the operation five years ago and is doing a great job, which ultimately freed us up to be able to turn our attention to the hotel development. Developing the Ambiente came in a round-about way. In 2008 our parents bought the old Real Estate Central property with its terrific views. Dad eventually transformed the old building exterior and Chef Lisa Dahl created the fabulous Mariposa Restaurant. A good friend of ours, who also happened to be our family dentist, owned a piece of land just up 89A from the Mariposa where he had long planned to build a hotel. He changed his mind and offered to sell it to my father. At the time I was working as my father’s executive assistant, and when he came back to the office he said, “I was just offered this property up the highway that already has an approved hotel site on it. What would you think about building a hotel?” I said let’s go look at it. We drove over and walked the property. After taking it all in we said, “Gosh this is beautiful! Wouldn’t it be a unique opportunity to do this all together as a family?” The whole concept for the Atrium-style rooms came from sitting at the Mariposa and watching people walk out on the lawn for a photo op. The first thing people do when they arrive for dinner is to go out on the lawn and take a photo of themselves with that gorgeous backdrop! It’s such a draw for so many people. We thought how awesome it would be to have that view in every room, or at least in as many rooms as we could, and have actual walls of glass to feature that amazing view which is the same as Mariposa has!

Q: How long have you been up here?

Colleen: A year. I finally raised the last child so I’mofficially an empty nester now. I had to wrap up parenting in Phoenix and then I headed up here to join the family project.

Q: Who is the most interesting person you’ve met here in Sedona?

Jennifer: I was blessed to know Bill Jump. I was so sad when he passed away but I got to know him really well. He was such a sweet man. He was one of those people I looked up to a lot. I had the chance to talk to him about his life, how his business had evolved, all the different things he did, how he had moved to Brazil for a while and then moved back to the States and what he was doing with the expansion he was working on at Out of Africa.He was just an incredibly warm, interesting and wonderful guy. I’ll miss him.

Q: What one piece of advice were you given that changed your life?

Jennifer: Going through this whole hotel project side by side with my dad has been amazing. I think the one piece of advice he has taught me through this whole thing was never to give up. He said a lot of people start a project and when it gets too hard they simply give up. There have been so many challenges on this project and so many times we’ve hit roadblocks that I think if I hadn’t been side by side with him and watched how he handles things and how he just doesn’t give up I would’ve probably would have been feeling like this is just way too hard. We started this whole thing without knowing anything about how to build a hotel. I probably would have faltered and given up if I hadn’t been watching the way our dad is, but we just kept pushing forward. His conviction is that there is always a way to get over, under, around or through an obstacle and we’re going to figure it out one way or another. So ‘just don’t stop’ has proven itself out and was a great learning experience for me.

Colleen: One of the things my dad said that has always stuck with me was when you have something difficult to take care or that needs your immediate attention just get it done and don’t put it off. Just get it over with, take care of it, address it and then move on to the next thing.

Q: Is there anyone (dead or alive) with whom would you love to have dinner? Why? 

Colleen: My grandpa Jack. My mom was the first of  7 kids and I was the first of 17 grandkids. I was kind of his little shadow for a long time when we moved to California and even when we moved back here, because he and my gramma were living here then too. I would always go play cribbage with him, and I would love to do that with him again. 

Q: What is something interesting that most people don’t know about you?

Jennifer: I have many tattoos that have a lot of meaning to me but that most people don’t expect to see, and I hunt deer. My husband Jimmy first got me into hunting and we love to go out together and have organic hormone-free meat to prepare for dinner. He is an amazing guide.

Colleen: I’m kind of such an open book. I can’t even think of something that someone wouldn’t know about me.

Q: How would your closest friend describe you?

Jennifer: My closest friend Shannon and I have been friends since we were four years old, so I would say we have kept each other sane in this crazy world and through all of life’s experiences.

Colleen: I have a few close friends and we call each other “bucket fillers”. When you’re with people that are drawing from you or pulling on you, you need bucket fillers. My girlfriends and I have ‘ab workouts’, we say. We get together, laugh a ton, fill each other’s buckets back up and then go back out into the world.

Q: What is your favorite restaurant in Sedona?

Jennifer: We always love to eat at Mariposa. Hudson’s is great too. Shorebird and Mole are both wonderful and Javelina Cantina.