About Quiet Shelters
Quiet Shelters is four distinct houses in and around Kanab, Utah: one adobe and three log cabins, each on at least two acres with red cliffs in view. They are made for the hours after a day in the canyons. A bed you sink into, a kitchen you will actually cook in, records, books, and somewhere outside to watch the light move across the cliffs.
Dave and I shaped every one of them ourselves, and no two are alike. I start with what a building already is and what lies outside its windows, then go looking for what belongs there: well-made antiques, pieces commissioned from craftspeople, handmade pottery, natural materials, art, books and records. Some things are new, some are very old. Some carry the mark of the person who made them. A few are a little imperfect. We like that.
THE ORIGIN
For years the red rock desert kept pulling me back. After a long day in Buckskin Gulch, Dave and I climbed out of the canyon and I told him, “One day, I will have a home here.” That night I set a Zillow alert for Kanab. Five years later, an adobe house among red cliffs and sagebrush appeared.
We drove out to see it, then kept going east to Cottonwood Wash near Bluff, on the edge of Bears Ears National Monument. The two stops had nothing to do with one another. We were simply curious about both.
The Adobe became the beginning of Quiet Shelters. Years later, Dave became Four Corners Regional Director for The Wildlands Conservancy and helped preserve that same land, now Speaking Springs Preserve. One place we would care for by making a home there. The other, by keeping it wild.
MAKING THE LODGINGS
We bought the Adobe in April 2020, just as the world shut down. Shipping had nearly stopped that spring, so we furnished the Adobe the slow way: Facebook Marketplace, antique shops, rock yards, strangers’ garages, and long drives across the Southwest with the car packed to the roof and Vivian, our dog, wedged in wherever she fit.
The benches came from a man in his sixties who had lost his job due to the pandemic and gone back to woodworking, his father’s trade. We met people like him again and again. Often the story of how something arrived became part of the reason it stayed.
The architect Christopher Alexander called it the quality without a name. You walk into a place and it feels right before you can say why. You sigh before you have set your bags down. This is exactly where I need to be. Each of these houses had some of that before we arrived. I try to notice it, the age of the logs, the color of the dirt, the light through one particular window, and then not cover it up.
HOSPITALITY
I first opened my home to travelers in 2013. For a few days our lives overlapped, stories were traded, and then everyone carried on. I still think about hosting that way.
We are small enough to be particular about things that don’t make much sense on a spreadsheet. We spend a ridiculous amount of time on what you actually touch and use: sheets, towels, pillows, soap, coffee. We choose brands and makers we trust, even when the sensible short-term-rental choice would be cheaper. We make the playlists, collect the books and records, and write the guides ourselves.
None of that is really the point. Guests tell us they stayed in longer than they meant to. They cooked, put on a record, sat outside, did very little for a while. That is what all the attention is for: a place considered enough that you can stop considering it.
A little room to actually be present.
HEATHER & DAVE | FOUNDERS
Quiet Shelters is still small. I’m Heather Morgan. Before this I taught psychology and yoga and worked alongside artisans and communities in Patagonia, Guatemala and Belize. Now I do the design, photography and writing, along with a fair amount of sanding, searching, and driving somewhere because I found a way too large dining table for the space. I spend an exorbitant amount of hours on things. It’s just my way.
Dave is my partner in all of it. He is Four Corners Regional Director for The Wildlands Conservancy, helping keep wild places wild. He collects books and records, builds things with me, and generally has a better idea than I do of how we are going to get whatever I just bought into the house.
Then there are Jenny and Mona, who look after the houses between every stay and do everything they can to make each one right. If a house feels like someone was expecting you, it is because they were there first.
Quiet Shelters is all of us, the local friends we partner with for our curated experiences, the people we meet along the way, and four houses we keep paying attention to.
The Shelters
RED ROCK ADOBE RETREAT
The Adobe asked for very little. The adobe bricks were made from earth dug from the property. The Venetian plaster is matched to the color of the dirt outside, and the trim to the sage growing around the house. The house wanted space around things. It wanted the architecture to stand on its own.
What did come in was chosen slowly. The 700-pound custom-made limestone patio table took a small part of Kanab to carry.
VERMILLION LOG CABIN REFUGE
A friend told me about Vermillion before it was ever listed. Real log walls, an A-frame loft, wood everywhere, and the Vermilion Cliffs outside.
The coffee table was a cobbler’s table more than a century ago. The dining table is an old Mexican door with its metal keyhole still in place. A primitive folding table was said to have come west by covered wagon. The shelves hold books and records we actually like. The walls hold work by women artists I admire.
GRAND CANYON CABIN HIDEAWAY
Dave and I made the reclaimed-wood coffee table ourselves, drawing its curve by hand. We built the cabinetry around the refrigerator and closet, and a neighbor made the cabinet for the record player.
I worked with an artisan in Los Angeles on the bed frame, aged an old pine dining table with vinegar and steel wool, and drove to Phoenix for an antique cabinet because nothing closer felt quite right. The black-and-white photographs of Zion are archival images from the 1920s through the 1940s that I found while digging through Utah historical collections.
GOLDENA LIBRARY CABIN
Goldena asked a lot of us. I limewashed every wall by hand, working with Portola Paints in Los Angeles to find the colors. I installed the zellige backsplash myself in weather cold enough to make running water through a tile saw freeze.
The kitchen cabinets were glossy and bright red. Dave and I sanded them down by hand, swore we would never do that again, and then I stained them dark. The piano I saved from the rain and a trailer in the neighborhood.
The patio table was sold to me as “a little warped.” Once we turned it upright, it was very warped. We kept it.
“To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.”
— Christopher Alexander
QUIET SHELTERS
Vacation rentals in Kanab, Utah. Founded in 2020 by Heather Morgan and Dave Herrero. Four houses, each on two acres or more, between Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.