What it means
A hacienda is a great Spanish estate and the big house at its center. In Scottsdale nobody runs one; the word survives as a look and a promise. Say “hacienda-style” and a local pictures thick, rounded stucco walls, a low red-tile roof, dark beams, an arcade of arches and a courtyard with a fountain or a mesquite tree in the middle, shade first and views second.
You meet it most on resorts and restaurants. The Hermosa Inn in Paradise Valley is the genuine article in spirit: the adobe home and studio cowboy artist Lon Megargee built by hand in the mid-1930s. La Hacienda is the Mexican dining room of the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. La Posada, the 1970s Lincoln Drive resort later replaced by the Omni Montelucia, sold hacienda charm at family prices. Even the designers of Old Town’s Maya day club described its pool deck as a contemporary hacienda courtyard.
On real estate listings “hacienda” means a Spanish-flavored house with a courtyard, and it is used generously.
Where you’ll meet it
On resort websites, restaurant signs, home listings in Paradise Valley and north Scottsdale, and in comparisons with the Spanish Colonial Revival and Pueblo Revival styles it borrows from.
Where the word came from
Hacienda is Spanish, from the Latin facienda, “things to be done,” a form of the verb facere, to do or make. The estates began in Andalusia during the Reconquista and spread through the Spanish Empire. In Mexico they grew from royal land grants; the crown made Hernan Cortes Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca in 1529, and the great estates that followed grew sugar, wheat and cattle for market. They ran on Indigenous labor, first under the encomienda system and later through debts that tied workers to the estate. The romance Scottsdale borrows leaves that part out.
The word entered English by 1772, according to Merriam-Webster, meaning an estate in a Spanish-speaking country or its main house. In the American Southwest it drifted from economics to architecture. Historians of the ranch house trace that style’s single story, low roofs, wide eaves and courtyards partly to the Spanish colonial buildings of the region, so the humble postwar ranch and the grand hacienda share an ancestor.
Megargee gave Scottsdale its best example. In the mid-1930s he bought six acres of empty desert in what is now Paradise Valley and built Casa Hermosa with motifs borrowed from colonial Mexico, beams salvaged from an abandoned mine, and a mixture of oil and ash to make the new walls look old. Faking age is a hacienda tradition here.
What it is not
A hacienda is not a casita: the casita is the little house, the hacienda the big one. It is also not a dude ranch, though Megargee ran Casa Hermosa as a guest ranch to pay the bills.
The fine print
The Hermosa’s record. Megargee sold Casa Hermosa in 1941. Later owners added a pool, tennis and more casitas and ran it as a small resort. A fire damaged it in 1987 and it sat vacant until Fred and Jennifer Unger bought it in 1992, restored the adobe and reopened it in 1994 as the Hermosa Inn. It joined Historic Hotels of America in 2011. Dates for the original construction vary between 1935 and 1936 depending on the source.
Reading a listing. In Scottsdale real estate the word has no legal meaning. Useful questions: Is the courtyard enclosed by the house on three or four sides, which is the hacienda plan, or is it a walled front yard? Are the beams structural or applied? Is the tile roof real clay or concrete? None of those answers makes a house better, but they tell you whether the word is describing the plan or just the paint.
Restaurants. Lon’s at the Hermosa serves dinner in Megargee’s rooms and on his patio, which is as close as Scottsdale gets to eating at a hacienda.