Why they matter
In 1956 downtown Scottsdale had spent five years dressing itself up as a Western town, with false fronts and hitching posts and a rodeo parade. Robert and Evelyn Foehl opened something that looked like none of it: a long, low modernist hotel of glass and concrete a few blocks from Main Street. The Hotel Valley Ho gave the resort town a modern wing and a nightlife to go with it.
The records on the Foehls themselves are thin. What survives is the hotel, and that is the point. Almost everything else from Scottsdale’s Hollywood winter era is gone. The Foehls’ building is still open, on its original corner, doing its original job.
Where to find their mark today
Hotel Valley Ho. The hotel itself, restored in 2005 to the way architect Edward L. Varney drew it: breezeblock screens, terrazzo floors, pastel panels.
The opening night. The day page for December 20, 1956 covers the opening and the guest book that followed.
The party. December 28, 1957 is the day Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner brought their wedding reception to the Foehls’ hotel.
The town they opened into
The Valley Ho arrived in the same boom season as the Safari Hotel up the road, and together they changed what Scottsdale sold. The prewar resorts sold quiet desert winters to wealthy easterners. The Foehls’ Valley Ho and Ernie Uhlmann’s Safari sold scene: air-conditioned rooms, cocktails and the chance of seeing a movie star at the next table. Hollywood found the Valley Ho through the productions shooting Westerns in the desert, and it stayed.
The Safari came down in 1999. The Valley Ho survived the Ramada years and was saved in 2005, the defining win of the city’s midcentury preservation movement, told on the December 1, 2005 day page. For the decade around it, read the 1950s.
The full story
Robert Foehl was the Hotel Valley Ho’s original owner-operator, and he ran it with his wife Evelyn as downtown’s clubhouse. The hotel opened on December 20, 1956, in a Scottsdale of barely five years’ incorporation, and its design came from Edward L. Varney, an architect trained under Frank Lloyd Wright who gave the Foehls horizontal lines, cantilevered concrete and desert light instead of adobe.
The combination worked. Tourists could shop the Western storefronts by day and drink somewhere sleek by night. Winter after winter the film crowd made the Valley Ho its address. Bing Crosby signed the guest book; Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis came through; and on December 28, 1957, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, married that day in a small Scottsdale church, filled the hotel with their reception. In 1962 Trader Vic’s opened next door and gave the block a tiki-hour pulse.
The Foehl era did not last forever. Ramada bought the hotel in 1973 and ran it as the Ramada Valley Ho for nearly three decades, dropping ceilings, carpeting the terrazzo and painting over the pastels. Westroc bought it in 2001, restored it for about $80 million and reopened it in December 2005. In 2008 Varney’s unbuilt tower finally rose. The Foehls’ part of the story is the beginning: a husband-and-wife operation that put a modern hotel in a cowboy town and made it the place Hollywood came to hide.