Why he matters
Scottsdale’s Western look was a costume the town put on in the 1950s. Edward L. Varney gave it its other look. His Hotel Valley Ho, opened in December 1956, was defiantly modern: glass, concrete and desert light in a low horizontal line, a few blocks from Main Street’s hitching posts. It proved a cowboy town could sell sleek.
He is one of the architects Frank Lloyd Wright’s presence drew into the Valley’s orbit, and the one whose best building survives almost exactly as he drew it.
Where to find his mark today
Hotel Valley Ho. The whole building is the exhibit: breezeblock, terrazzo, pastel panels and a roofline aimed at Camelback.
The 2008 tower. Built from his unbuilt concept, it is his design finished by other hands.
The day pages. December 20, 1956 covers the opening; December 1, 2005 covers the restoration that brought his work back.
Seeing it for yourself
You do not need a room to see Varney’s work. Walk in from Main Street, look at the terrazzo and the conversation-pit fireplace, and ask about the hotel’s history cards and tours. The owners who opened it, Robert and Evelyn Foehl, got a building that was a stage set in reverse: everything real, nothing false-fronted.
For context, pair it with Taliesin West, where the teacher worked, and read the 1950s chapter for the year the Valley Ho and the Safari Hotel gave Scottsdale a modern wing.
The full story
Edward L. Varney trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, whose winter camp at Taliesin West made Scottsdale a name in architecture from 1937 on. By the mid-1950s the town had incorporated, legislated its Western character, and was ready for something bolder downtown. Varney’s commission for owner-operator Robert Foehl produced it: a long, low modernist resort of cantilevered concrete, breezeblock screens, terrazzo and pastel panels that opened on December 20, 1956.
The hotel became Hollywood’s desert address almost at once, but Varney’s building had a harder second act. Ramada bought it in 1973, and nearly three decades of budget operation dropped the ceilings, carpeted the terrazzo and painted over the pastels. The cheapness turned out to protect the bones: much of what was covered was never destroyed.
When Westroc bought the hotel in 2001, the restoration team worked from Varney’s drawings and period photographs, and the December 2005 reopening was treated as national news in design circles. Then came the rarest part of the story. In 2008 Westroc built a seven-story tower from a concept Varney had designed in the 1950s but never raised. The site’s records say little else about his career; this one building, finished half a century apart, is how Scottsdale remembers him. The decade he worked in is in the boomtown era.