What it means
When a Scottsdale listing says “Spanish Colonial,” it means a low red-tile roof, smooth stucco walls, a round arch or two and, if the builder was feeling it, a courtyard with a fountain. Spanish Colonial Revival is the formal name for that look, an American invention of the 1910s and 1920s that pretended to be the architecture of New Spain. Locals shorten it to “Spanish,” “Spanish style” or, when the roof is tile and nothing else fits, “Mediterranean.”
You hear it most from realtors, homeowners’ associations and resort marketers. The best place to see the real thing is the Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue, which Mexican parishioners built by hand from about 6,000 adobe bricks to a design by Robert T. Evans and finished in 1933. It went on the National Register of Historic Places with a ceremony on January 18, 2019, and it is the one building in town the style’s name attaches to without argument.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Mission, on the Omni Montelucia and its bell tower, in the 1960s and 1970s townhouses off Hayden Road and in McCormick Ranch, on the Mercado-style shopping centers of the 1980s, and on about half the custom houses built in north Scottsdale since. The city’s historic preservation office uses the label “Popular Spanish Colonial” for the postwar version.
Where the word came from
The style has a birthday. For the Panama-California Exposition that opened in San Diego in 1915, architect Bertram Goodhue and his associate Carleton Winslow built a fairground of towers, arcades and Churrigueresque ornament modeled on the Spanish Baroque buildings Goodhue had sketched in Spain and Mexico. It was the first American exposition to pick a Spanish theme, and the country noticed. Within a decade the look had become the default for new money in California, Florida and Texas, and its greatest popularity ran from 1915 to 1931, the years the Sun Belt’s resort towns were laid out.
It replaced, or rather absorbed, two older styles. Mission Revival, from the 1890s, copied the plain stucco and curved parapets of the California missions and travelled east on Fred Harvey’s railroad hotels. Mediterranean Revival added Italian villas to the mix. Spanish Colonial Revival took the stucco from the first and the richness from the second and added wrought iron, glazed tile, carved doors and the courtyard.
Arizona caught it in the 1920s. Phoenix’s Orpheum Theatre, finished in 1929 by Lescher and Mahoney, is a full Spanish Colonial Revival atmospheric house. Scottsdale, a farm village of a few hundred people, got the style the way it got most things then: through Robert T. Evans, the builder-architect who was putting up adobe houses along Camelback Road and who designed the Mission in 1933. His Jokake Inn towers of 1936, which still stand on the Phoenician’s lawn, show how blurry the categories were; a radio history calls them Pueblo Revival, this site calls their massing Mission Revival, and both are right.
After the war the style became a catalog item. The city’s own survey of postwar townhouses lists Popular Spanish Colonial as a recognized type: stucco or painted block walls, a combination of red-tiled gable, shed and flat roofs, vigas, canales, iron grates, balconets and Roman arches. Dave Friedman’s Villa Monterey, begun in 1961, was marketed as a “casita colony” trading on exactly that romance. The 2008 Montelucia, built as an Andalusian hill village for roughly $335 million, is the same idea at resort scale.
What it is not
It is not Pueblo Revival, which is the flat-roofed, round-cornered, vigas-through-the-wall style borrowed from New Mexico and worn by the Camelback Inn since December 15, 1936. It is not Territorial, which puts brick trim on an adobe box. And it is not the Arizona Biltmore, which is concrete textile block and has nothing Spanish about it beyond the palm trees.
The fine print
The style’s authenticity is the thing to argue about. Spain’s actual colonial buildings in Arizona were missions and presidios of mud brick, mostly plain; the red tile, the ironwork and the fountains came from Andalusia and from Goodhue’s imagination, a romance about a past that did not quite happen here. Scottsdale’s Mission makes the point in reverse: it was built by the Mexican families who worked the cotton fields and ranches, in adobe they made themselves, two men producing more than 4,000 of the bricks, some weighing fifty pounds. It is the most honest Spanish Colonial building in the city precisely because its builders were not reviving anything.
The record has holes. No one has documented when the tile roof became the default for north Scottsdale custom homes. And the city’s postwar style survey is careful to say its “popular revival” categories are visual references rather than complete styles: a tile roof and an arch make a house “Spanish” in the market’s eyes, with nothing else required. That is roughly how locals use the word too. For the architects who took the desert seriously instead of dressing it up, see the Frank Lloyd Wright and desert architecture note.