What it means
Casita is Spanish for “little house,” and in Scottsdale it has three working meanings.
At a resort, a casita is a room in a low, separate building instead of a tower: your own door, a patio, a path to the lobby. The Valley’s grand old resorts were built this way. Camelback Inn opened in 1936 as a scatter of adobe casitas and still has 453 of them; the Hermosa Inn has 43; the Four Seasons at Troon North put 210 among the boulders. “We’re in a casita” means the opposite of an elevator.
At home, a casita is the small detached building behind or beside the house: a guest suite, an office, a place for a parent or a college graduate. And on a real estate listing, “with casita” is shorthand for that building, often with a bath and sometimes a kitchen.
The third meaning is legal. Planners call it an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, and since 2025 it is the subject of a state law Scottsdale did not want.
Where you’ll meet it
On resort booking pages, in the where to stay guide, on nearly every north Scottsdale listing, in moving to Scottsdale conversations about multigenerational homes, and in City Council agendas about short-term rentals.
Where the word came from
Casita is the diminutive of casa, house. Merriam-Webster dates its first known use in English to 1822, and it came into Southwestern English with the rest of the Spanish building vocabulary: adobe, ramada, hacienda.
Scottsdale made it a selling word. The resort pioneers of the 1930s sold Easterners on privacy and desert air, and the casita delivered both: one-story rooms under the mountains, no corridors, no neighbors overhead. When the developer Dave Friedman started Villa Monterey west of Miller Road in 1961, on land he had bought near Camelback Road and the canal, he called it a “casita colony” and defined the phrase in his ads as “small houses built together,” a blending, he said, of graceful Spanish design and modern convenience. The city’s historic preservation office notes that the label drew on a romantic view of the West’s Spanish past. It worked: 180 units sold in the first six months, and Villa Monterey is now the city’s largest historic townhouse district.
The backyard casita grew from the same instinct. Valley lots are wide, winters bring visiting family, and a detached room with its own door keeps everyone friendly.
What it is not
A casita is not a hacienda, which is the big house, nor a cabana, which is a shade tent by a pool and has no bed. And a backyard casita is not automatically a legal rental. Scottsdale distinguishes a guest house, which shares utilities with the main house and cannot be rented, from an ADU, which has its own kitchen, bath and meters and can be.
The fine print
The state laws. In May 2024 the Legislature passed HB 2720, requiring Arizona cities of at least 75,000 people to allow accessory dwelling units on single-family lots. Scottsdale’s first response used an “airport vicinity” map to exclude most residential areas, and legislators answered in 2025 with HB 2928, written partly to close that route. On September 30, 2025 the City Council adopted Ordinance 4687 unanimously, on the consent agenda, while members called the law an assault on local control. It is a textbook case of preemption.
The rules now. One attached and one detached ADU are allowed per single-family lot, and a third detached unit on lots of an acre or more if one is income-restricted affordable housing. The first ADU may be 1,000 square feet or 75 percent of the main house, whichever is less; additional ones are capped at 500 square feet. No more than six adults may live on the lot in total. If an ADU is rented, including as a short-term rental, the owner must live on the property.
The fine print behind the fine print. State law limits what cities can demand, but private deed restrictions and HOA rules are a separate question. Read your CC&Rs before you pour a slab.