At a thousand feet above the seven thousand-foot altitude of Santa Fe, with 360-degree views of four mountain ranges, Soaring Eagle is not only the highest house in the city, it is unquestionably one of the most unusual. Surrounded by sixty-five pinon-covered acres, the Egyptian-Mayan-Incan temple-like residence, owned by Arlene and Marty Markinson and designed by Adrian DeWindt, appears suitable for the gathering of priests and priestesses.  Instead, it is the dream come true of a transplanted New York couple who, like Moses, were led to the mountaintop.  “I was meant to live here.  I was channeled for the land and for the house,” Arlena, a retired psychotherapist turned ordained minister, tells awestruck visitors.  Her husband, Marty, a bicoastal entertainment executive, conceded he had no part in the revelation.  But Arlena did.  “I didn’t build the house.  I envisioned it,” she confides.  “I wanted the house to be an expression of my being, to reflect all the cultural experiences I’ve had in past lives.”

            Stepping through a twenty-foot-high entrance portal, guests ascend a seemingly endless outside flight of stressed stairs, which dip in the middle and are made of ox blood-colored poured cement.  Catching their breath, they pass through a series of pre-Columbian theme courtyards illustrating water, sky, and fire.  At last just past a stone jaguar by sculptor Doug Hyde, appears the house’s front door. Correction. The seven-thousand-square-foot “temple’s” Inca-esque grand entrance looms ahead:  a 1,250 pound, twelve-foot-high steel-and-copper trapezoid through which any top-ranking resident of ancient Cuzco would have been proud to pass. (Designed by artist Larry Hall, the massive structure took ten men to install.)

            Past the threshold, Soaring Eagle takes off.  Guarding the entrance foyer are two life-sized figures, a horse kachina and a buffalo kachina, both by artist Jeff Hengesbaugh.  Decorated with buffalo skin, horse hair, and Indian artifacts – drums, blankets, shaman beads, and fetishes – the primeval figures cause the weak of heart to grow weaker. 

            “Arlena didn’t care if anyone felt intimidated by the house and its decoration,” recalls Deena Perry, the house’s interior designer.  To meet her client’s requirements, she immersed herself in the back-to-earth colors, symbolized textiles, and bare-bones furnishings of ancient civilizations.  “Arlene had vision, inspiration, and intuition. And she expected the very same from everyone who worked on the house.  She frequently spoke of the need to reflect the power of the land.  No other client I’ve had has required this connection.

            Adrian DeWindt also recognized that Soaring Eagle would be a challenging commission.  “Arlene spoke in metaphysical concepts, of being in harmony with the land, but never in terms of rooms.  I’ve designed five churches, and the client never once said anything about soul, spirit, God.  Arlena did all the time.  Yes, the house is theatrical.  But, it has great substance.  There’s recognizable honesty in the materials used, and in the phenomenal craftsmanship.”

            With twenty-two-foot-high, all-glass front windows, crystal-shaped ceilings, numerous passageways (“not hallways!” says Arlena), Soaring Eagle, like an abstract sculpture, is a profusion of angles with no horizontal or vertical lines whatsoever.  Towering, raw earth-colored plaster walls combined with great expanses of intricately laid rocks, full of marine fossils, give massive form and clear definition to the house’s interior space, which according to Arlena, is full of energy.