A handmade home

ANY fool can hire an designer to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an creative person — to start edifice and see where the earth and driftwood and sherd of broken pottery take him, and an as impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.

This is how it was with the little-known sculptural home that is Eliphante, three acres of fantastical domes, hovel and foolishness created over 28 years by Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Here there is the abode, which has 25-foot ceilings and incorporates rocks and bit from building sites; there, a studio, one wall of which is the Ford pickup truck that brought the couple west; and a labyrinthine art gallery called Pipedreams, in which every picture has its own environment.

The edifice that gave the chemical compound its name has a long, trunklike entrance made of rock and an irregularly mounded roof. "Aaah, Ella-fahn-tay," a friend joked soon after it was built, gift it a playful faux-French pronunciation.

The couple began edifice when they first arrived here, though they did not own the place, and they continued to do so until the progressive tense brain disease, which killed Kahn this Dec at age 71, robbed him of the ability to speak.

Was there a floor plan? Did they discuss the figure of bedrooms, the layout of the kitchen?

"We didn't think in those terms," says Livant, who is 82. "We idea shelter from the component and a beautiful place to live in: stained glass and clayware and wood, sleeping loft and a fireplace. Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive."

Eliphante is in red-rock country, near Sedona, and while Livant and Kahn turned it into a nonprofit arts organization in the late 1980s and she still permits occasional tours to offset the costs, it remains hidden. (Information is at eliphante.org.) The sign, painted on a stump, is small, and the compound is bounded by a creek. If the waters are low and a vehicle is sturdy, a visitor can drive across; otherwise Lonnie Haight, a 46-year-old woodcarver and handyman who helps out at Eliphante, will get you in a canoe while Livant waits on the other side.

This is where she was last week, a beautiful old hippie with lush white hair, a pink vest over a purple sweater and, around her neck, a leather pouch that does not contain, as one suspects, her husband's ashes, but her hearing aid.

The property is a mixture of disarray and magic: a tree adorned with clusters of bottles; a court fenced in with battered rackets, called the Nennis court since there is no net and no tennis; sculpture; and an incongruous carpet of AstroTurf, contributed by the nearby town of Cottonwood when it renovated its tennis courts. "At first I thought it was terribly artificial," Livant says. "But it keeps the dust down, and it highlights the sculpture. And it does not prevent rain from coming through to nurture the earth."

Everything is slightly off-kilter, and many structures and pieces of art have been damaged by the floodwaters of the creek, the climate and what Livant calls critters. In the mountains of Arizona, that means more than squirrels.

"You know what that is?" Livant says, as she takes a visitor up the rocky hill leading to the compound. "Coyote poop." A portal in a rock wall that once afforded a panoramic view of the property has been filled with dirt by a gopher. Mice nibble the ends of the canvases in the Pipedreams gallery. Last year, Livant's dog was killed.

Coyotes?

"Rattlesnakes," Livant says. "They're hibernating now."

Livant's residence is called Hippodome. It rises gently out of the ground, looking somewhat like a hippo emerging from a lake. One exterior wall has a mosaic of yellow and blue ceramic tiles, left over from somebody's expensive kitchen renovation.

Livant's daughter, Wendy Jones, who has come in from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a visit and is a communications manager for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a life coach, says she understands why it might make a visitor stop and stare. "Looks like something a Hobbit would live in, doesn't it?" she asks.