What it is
Stagecoach Village is the shopping village at the east end of Cave Creek Road, where Cave Creek runs into Carefree. Unlike the rest of the town’s main street, which grew one saloon and one feed store at a time, the village was built as a piece: about 105,000 square feet of shops, galleries, restaurants and offices around parking and walkways, with Black Mountain standing over the rooftops. There are more than two dozen tenants. The retail runs from a custom hatter to Western interiors and galleries; the services run from an arts league to a salon and architects’ offices; the food is a coffee shop, a pizza bistro and a craft beer room.
Two things make it more than a shopping center. The first is Watson’s Hat Shop, where Eric Watson makes beaver-felt and panama hats by hand on machinery from the 1800s, which is the single best reason to stop here. The second is the calendar: the village is where Cave Creek holds its big days, the Indian Market, Taste of Cave Creek, art and wine festivals, car shows and the December Western Holidays, when the lots become grounds and the town turns out.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
For the hat, first. For the rest, be honest: Scottsdale has more shopping than anyone needs, covered in our shopping note, and Stagecoach Village is worth the drive when you are already heading to Cave Creek or Carefree and want a civilized hour before or after the saloons. On a festival weekend the calculation changes, and Taste of Cave Creek or Western Holidays can be the reason for the whole day.
The practical version
About thirty-eight minutes from Old Town with no traffic: Scottsdale Road north until it ends in Carefree, west on Cave Creek Road, and the village is on the north side just over the town line, which makes it the closest part of Cave Creek to Scottsdale. Parking is free. Shops keep roughly mid-morning-to-five hours and several close one weekday; the restaurants run later. Carefree’s sundial and galleries are a few minutes east, the saloon strip a mile west.
When to go
October to April is the season for both the shops and the calendar. Taste of Cave Creek, in October, is the town’s restaurants under booths with bands and around eight thousand people; come at four, before the lot fills. The Cave Creek Indian Market, with about 80 Native and Southwestern artists, is the serious shopping weekend, and our buying Native American art note applies to it as much as to Old Town. Western Holidays in December runs Friday through Sunday with an artisan market, a beer and wine garden, carolers from the high school, a balloon glow on Saturday evening and a tractor parade, and admission has been a toy or food donation.
Between festivals, a weekday morning is the best browsing: the shops at ten, the hat shop unhurried, the coffee shop for a second cup. Summer weekdays are quiet to the point of empty, which is fine for the hat fitting and poor for atmosphere.
What to do, in order
- Watson’s Hat Shop. Go in even if you are not buying; the machinery and the blocking are a show.
- Cowbells Western Interiors and the galleries. The Western-interiors end of the Southwest look, for people furnishing a house or pretending to.
- Coffee at the Village Coffee Shop, or pizza at Brugo’s if it is lunch.
- Cave Creek Beer Company, if the day is ending here rather than on the strip.
With kids
Western Holidays is built for them: hayrides, ornament making, face painting, Santa. The rest of the year the village is a shopping center, and the Cave Creek Museum a mile west is the better stop.
The neighborhood
East is Carefree, with the sundial, the galleries and El Pedregal at the Boulders, the other festival marketplace of the north Valley. West is the rest of Cave Creek: the Horny Toad, Harold’s, the Buffalo Chip and Frontier Town.
The story
Cave Creek was on military maps by 1870 as a cavalry remount station on the road from Fort McDowell to Fort Whipple, and the stagecoach that the village is named for ran that road before the mines and the ranches gave the town a reason to exist. The town incorporated in 1986 to stay rural and has spent the decades since arguing about every building permit on Cave Creek Road. Stagecoach Village is the largest thing the argument produced: a planned commercial village in the 2000s at the Carefree end of the road, built in a scale and a style the town could live with, with a property manager who doubles as a special events manager because the events are half the job.
That second half grew into the village’s identity. The Taste of Cave Creek moved in and became the town’s biggest night; the Indian Market gave the north Valley its own version of the shows that fill Scottsdale in the winter; Western Holidays, launched as the village’s first Christmas celebration with Sanderson Ford as title sponsor, added a balloon glow and a tractor parade to the calendar. Tenants came and went, as they do, including a golf-simulator venue whose ten-thousand-square-foot space has been for lease; the anchor that has stayed and grown is Watson’s Hat Shop, which moved in from a smaller Cave Creek storefront in the mid-2010s and more than doubled its floor.
The Scottsdale connection
Stagecoach Village is the north Valley’s answer to the festival marketplaces Scottsdale and Carefree built in the 1980s and 1990s, El Pedregal at the Boulders chief among them, and it plays the same role for Cave Creek that the Hidden in the Hills studio tour plays for the whole Desert Foothills in November: the organized, ticket-free, park-once version of a scattered town. Scottsdale visitors at the Boulders, CIVANA and the Pinnacle Peak resorts are its natural weekend crowd.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north until it ends at Cave Creek Road in Carefree, then west for a few minutes; the village is on the north side at 7100 East Cave Creek Road, just inside Cave Creek. From Old Town about thirty-eight minutes, from the Troon and Pinnacle Peak resorts fifteen to twenty. On festival nights the lots fill early; park on the Carefree side and walk in. Our getting-around note covers the rideshare question for the drive home.