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Landmark day • Thursday, December 1, 2005

December 2005: The Hotel Valley Ho Reopens

The hotel that Ramada nearly loved to death comes back exactly as Varney drew it — and Scottsdale discovers that its midcentury past is worth more than the lot it sits on.

The Hotel Valley Ho, Scottsdale's midcentury modern hotel, opened December 1956 and restored in 2005
The Hotel Valley Ho, as Varney drew it. Photo: Marine 69-71, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened

Westroc Hospitality reopened the Hotel Valley Ho in December 2005 after a roughly $80 million restoration that returned Edward Varney's 1956 modernist hotel — its breezeblock screens, terrazzo floors, pastel panels, and cantilevered balconies — to original condition, with a new spa and the OH Pool. Westroc had bought the aging Ramada Valley Ho in 2001 as demolition rumors circulated. The seven-story tower Varney designed but never built followed in 2008.

Why it matters

The Valley Ho's rescue proved that Scottsdale's midcentury architecture could be an asset instead of a teardown, at the exact moment the boom was clearing Old Town for condo towers. It became the model for the city's preservation program and the anchor of a downtown that sells its 1950s glamour rather than apologizing for it.

The beige decades

The Valley Ho had opened on December 20, 1956 as the most glamorous building in town: Edward Varney’s long, low modernist hotel, all glass and concrete and desert light, with a guest book that ran from Bing Crosby to the Natalie Wood–Robert Wagner wedding reception. It was also, for most of its life, a business in decline. Ramada bought it in 1973 and ran it for nearly three decades as the Ramada Valley Ho, painting over the pastels, dropping ceilings, and carpeting the terrazzo until Varney’s design was buried under a generic motel. By the late 1990s the property was tired, cheap, and sitting on some of the most valuable land in Old Town. The obvious next step was a bulldozer.

Westroc Hospitality bought it instead in 2001, one of the first big moves of a preservation instinct that was just then taking hold in Scottsdale — a city that had spent fifty years selling itself as brand new. The restoration that followed was archaeology as much as construction: stripping the additions, rediscovering the original colors and materials, rebuilding the breezeblock screens and cantilevered balconies to Varney’s drawings, and adding only what the 1956 hotel would have wanted, a spa and a pool scene. The budget ran to roughly $80 million. In December 2005, forty-nine years to the month after its debut, the Hotel Valley Ho reopened.

What it proved

The timing was the point. Scottsdale in 2005 was at the top of the boom, with the Waterfront towers rising on the canal and Old Town’s older blocks going under for condos and clubs. The Valley Ho showed that the alternative could pay — that a restored midcentury landmark could charge more than a new one, and that the city’s 1950s identity was a brand rather than an embarrassment. Varney’s unbuilt tower went up in 2008 from his original concept; the city’s midcentury inventory became something to protect rather than clear; and the hotel settled in as the best midcentury museum in Arizona that also rents rooms.

Its full story is in the resort guide. The year’s other milestones — the city fire department’s first shift, the SkySong deal, a special census of 226,395 — are at 2005, and the decade’s rise and crash in the 2000s chapter.