Why he matters
Two of the best-loved adobe landmarks in Scottsdale’s story passed through the hands of one builder. Robert T. Evans, R.T. or Bob, was the son of the painter Jessie Benton Evans, and in the mid-1920s he built a rambling adobe house on twelve acres of her Camelback estate. It became the Jokake Inn, and he went on to design every adobe structure on its grounds, including the twin bell towers of 1936.
He did not only build for resort society. In the same years he built a mansion for the Donald Kellogg family that became the Casa Blanca Inn, and he gave Scottsdale’s Mexican-American Catholics the design, equipment and tools for the Old Adobe Mission. He had studied adobe construction in Sonora and New Mexico, and it shows in both the mission and the towers.
The Jokake adobe style he built, mud walls and exposed beams with Camelback as the view, became the corridor’s signature and still runs through every “authentic Sonoran” lobby in town.
Where to find his mark today
The Jokake bell towers. The 1936 towers stand on the lawn of The Phoenician, restored in 2019 and free to walk to.
The Old Adobe Mission. Brown Avenue and First Street, finished in 1933 and restored in 2003. The design is his; the bricks are the congregation’s.
What the record disagrees on
The histories cannot settle on his job title. The Jokake Inn Tea Room history calls him an architect; the mission’s history calls him a builder and businessman; the Casa Blanca’s calls him the master adobe builder of the Jokake dynasty. None of them records a license or a formal training beyond his study of adobe in Sonora and New Mexico, so “adobe builder and designer” is the safe description.
The founding of the Jokake Inn is the other open question. Some histories credit his mother; the inn’s own say he built the house and his wife Sylvia Evans and Lucy Cuthbert opened the tearoom in 1926. Either way, the buildings were his.
The full story
Robert T. Evans was the son of Jessie Benton Evans, an Italian-trained landscape painter who had settled at the foot of Camelback Mountain. She gave her son twelve acres of the estate. In the mid-1920s he built an adobe house on them. A young Hopi visitor looked at it and called it Jokake, “mud house.” In 1926 his wife Sylvia and her friend Lucy Cuthbert began serving tea there, and by 1928 the tea guests were staying the night. As the inn grew casita by casita, Evans designed each adobe building.
In the same decade he built a desert mansion for the Donald Kellogg family out on McDonald Drive, when McDonald Drive was barely a road. It later passed to George Borg and, from 1953, became the Casa Blanca Inn.
His most public work was for a congregation that could not pay him much. In the late 1920s Scottsdale’s Mexican-American Catholics began raising money for a church, and Evans, who had studied adobe construction in Sonora and New Mexico, supplied plans, equipment and tools in a Spanish Colonial Revival idiom borrowed from the mission churches of both places. Grandvell Shumaker drew the blueprints. The parishioners and their Yaqui neighbors made about 14,000 bricks by hand, often while the same crews were laying adobe in the houses going up around Camelback. The church was finished in 1933. The Corral family and the mission builders have their own page.
In 1936 he designed the Jokake’s bell tower building, where afternoon tea was served. The towers rose the same year Camelback Inn opened, and they became Scottsdale’s postcard image through the 1940s. Robert and Sylvia divorced in that decade, and she ran the inn on without him. The record does not keep his birth or death years or what he built after the 1930s.
When Charles Keating cleared the Jokake land for The Phoenician in the 1980s, the towers were the one thing he kept. Between them and the mission, his two best-known surviving buildings sit a few miles apart, one on a resort lawn and one on a neighborhood corner.