What it is
The Wrigley Mansion is a 24-room Spanish-Mediterranean house on a 100-foot knoll directly above the Arizona Biltmore, built by William Wrigley Jr. between 1929 and 1931 and finished for about $1.2 million at a time when that bought a good deal of house. Wrigley, who made his fortune in chewing gum and owned the Chicago Cubs and Catalina Island, had just become sole owner of the hotel below; the house was a fiftieth-anniversary present for his wife Ada and a winter base for the family. The tiles in the main hall came from the Wrigleys’ own factory on Catalina and were carried up the hill by donkey. He died in the house in January 1932, a few months after it was done.
The family sold in 1973, and the house spent two decades passing through hands until a plan to level it for condominiums brought Geordie Hormel, heir to the meatpacking fortune and a working musician, and his wife Jamie to the rescue in 1992. They restored it and opened it as a club. Jamie Hormel has run it since Geordie’s death in 2006, finished a year-long renovation in 2021, and brought in Christopher Gross, the James Beard award-winning chef who has been cooking in this part of Phoenix for decades, for the tasting-menu room called Christopher’s.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because nothing in Scottsdale has this view, this age or this story in one place. The knoll looks south across the Biltmore’s roofs to the whole city and east to Camelback Mountain, and the tour is a real hour of Phoenix history told in the rooms it happened in. It is also the best place to end a Biltmore afternoon.
The practical version
Eighteen minutes from Old Town, up Telawa Trail behind the Biltmore. Three ways in: the 45-to-60-minute tour (reserve), a drink or dinner at Geordie’s or Jamie’s Wine Bar, or Christopher’s tasting menu. The place is technically a private club because of its zoning; a reservation handles that at the door. Level-four prices, except the tour.
When to go
Late afternoon in winter. Take the last tour, walk out onto the terrace as the light goes orange on Camelback, and move to the wine bar. From November to March the sunset is early enough to make a six o’clock dinner the sunset dinner. Summer evenings work too, with the heat gone by eight and the city lights the show instead of the mountain; the house is cool and mostly empty on a July weeknight. Weekends are wedding season on the hill; the mansion is a major event venue, which is the one reason to confirm your tour the morning of.
How to do it
- The tour. About an hour, guided, covering both families. You see the Colina Room (Wrigley’s bedroom, with the newspaper clipping about his death at the house), the Breakfast Room that Ada preferred for its mountain view, the main hall’s Catalina tile and the 1920s Steinway player piano in the living room, which the guides will play. The ghost stories are part of the script; our haunted Scottsdale note has the Valley’s other ones.
- Jamie’s Wine Bar. The small room with the serious list, the place for a glass and a plate after the tour. The Scottsdale wine rooms are more casual; this is the dressed-up version.
- Geordie’s. The restaurant and lounge, with the terrace and the view. Lunch is the easiest reservation; dinner on a Friday is not.
- Christopher’s. Christopher Gross’s modern tasting menu, a set multi-course dinner in a small room. Book well ahead and plan the evening around it; it is the most ambitious cooking on this side of the Valley and priced accordingly. The inaugural Michelin Guide Southwest, revealed in August 2026, listed Christopher’s as Recommended; no Arizona restaurant received a star.
With kids
The tour is fine for a patient ten-year-old who likes old houses and ghost stories; younger than that, and the hour is long. The restaurants are grown-up rooms. Pair the tour with the pools at your own resort rather than expecting to run around here.
The story
Wrigley came to Arizona through the Biltmore. He had been the hotel’s largest investor at its 1929 opening and, when the crash ruined the McArthur brothers who built it, he took full ownership in 1930 and ran it as the family’s winter hotel. The house on the knoll above was the private half of the arrangement: a place to winter in sight of the hotel, designed in the mixed Spanish, California Monterey and Mediterranean manner of a Pasadena estate, which is where the Wrigleys otherwise lived. The tile from Catalina, the hilltop siting, the sheer size of the thing for a seasonal house: all of it was a statement that Phoenix was now a place a man like Wrigley wintered. He barely got to use it, dying there in January 1932.
The Wrigleys kept the house for forty years and sold in 1973, three years after they sold the hotel. The house then did what big old houses in growing cities do: changed hands, lost purpose and by the early 1990s was slated for demolition to make way for condominiums. Geordie Hormel, a composer and musician who had grown up in the Hormel meatpacking family, and his wife Jamie bought it in 1992, restored it and opened it as a club because the residential zoning allowed nothing else. The National Register listing had come in 1989. Hormel’s own paintings still hang in the Pasadena Room. After his death in 2006 Jamie Hormel kept the house going, finished a year-long renovation in 2021, and turned it from a members’ lunch spot into a real dining destination by giving Christopher Gross, a James Beard Best Chef award winner with a long Biltmore-area history, his own room.
The Scottsdale connection
The house belongs to the same moment as the Camelback corridor resorts: the Jokake Inn and Camelback Inn were being built on the far side of the mountain in the same decade, for the same winter visitors. Wrigley’s view from the knoll takes in the Phoenician’s slope and the whole of resort row. For visitors doing our couples’ weekend, this is the dinner that gets the mountain from the other side.
Getting there
Camelback Road west to 24th Street, north past the Arizona Biltmore’s entrance on Missouri Avenue, and right on Telawa Trail, which winds up the knoll to the mansion’s lot. There is parking at the top and valet on busy nights. It is a two-minute drive from the Biltmore’s lobby, so the natural plan is the hotel first and the hill for sunset.