Why he matters
Most resorts in the Valley were built by developers. One was built by a cowboy artist, with his own hands. Lon Megargee was the Valley’s great self-invented character, a Philadelphia runaway who worked Arizona ranches, painted saloons and movie sets, and then painted the state into the images it still uses for itself. His best-known picture, a cowboy letting his horse drink the last water from his hat, became Stetson’s emblem.
In the mid-1930s he started stacking adobe on a patch of desert below Camelback and called it Casa Hermosa, “beautiful house.” He built it the way he lived: thick walls, hand-hewn beams, hidden stairs, and, the lore insists, a cellar arranged for Prohibition-era hospitality. It is in Paradise Valley rather than Scottsdale, but it belongs to the same artists’ chapter of hospitality as the Jokake Inn and the Camelback Inn, and it is one of very few pre-war buildings in that corridor still standing.
Where to find his mark today
The Hermosa Inn. Forty-three casitas on Palo Cristi Road, with his adobe as the core and his paintings back on the walls.
Lon’s at the Hermosa. The restaurant in his living rooms and on his patio, a standing candidate for the Valley’s most romantic dinner.
The Last Drop bar. A tiny bar at the inn named for the Stetson painting, and the best way to see the building without booking dinner.
Seeing it for yourself
The inn hides on a residential street five minutes west of Scottsdale Road, inside the stretch covered by the Camelback Corridor guide. Pair it with the Jokake Inn’s surviving 1936 bell towers on the Phoenician’s lawn and you have seen most of what remains of the painters’ era of Valley hospitality in one afternoon.
Be clear about what is original. A 1987 fire damaged the property, and the 1992–94 restoration by Fred and Jennifer Unger rebuilt it with new adobe made to match the old. The plan, the walls at the heart of the building, and the art are Megargee’s. The polish is theirs, and it is the reason the place survived at all.
The full story
Lon Megargee was born in Philadelphia in 1883 and arrived in Arizona around 1896, still a teenager. He cowboyed, gambled, painted saloon walls, married five times, and talked the young state into commissioning his murals for the Capitol. Somewhere along the way he painted Last Drop from his Stetson, the cowboy giving his horse the last of his hat’s water, and Stetson made it one of the most familiar images in the West.
By the 1930s the Valley north of Camelback was open desert with the occasional dude ranch and artist’s folly, and Megargee built one of the follies. Casa Hermosa went up in the middle of the decade; the inn’s own records date its opening to 1936, the same year the Camelback Inn opened a few miles north. He built it with recycled timbers and his own labor: part home, part studio, part stage set for the Western self he had invented. It took paying guests as a small guest ranch.
Megargee was brilliant, charming and chronically broke, and in 1941 he sold it. The property spent the next decades as a small resort, adding casitas, a pool and tennis while keeping his handmade core. Then came the 1987 fire, which at almost any other Paradise Valley address would have ended with a teardown. Instead Fred and Jennifer Unger bought the damaged landmark in 1992 and reopened it in 1994 as the Hermosa Inn, and they put the restaurant in the artist’s house and named it for him.
He died in 1960. The inn reads as autobiography: a man who performed Arizona before Arizona quite existed as an idea, and then built himself a house to match.