What is Fountain Park Hotel?
Most visitors see Fountain Hills as a half-day trip. They drive out Shea from Scottsdale, watch the fountain go off, have lunch and drive back. Fountain Park Hotel is for the people who decide to stay the night. It’s a three-story select-service hotel on Saguaro Boulevard, directly across the street from Fountain Park. It is the only hotel in town where you can walk to the fountain, the lake loop and the patios on the Avenue of the Fountains.
The building opened in 2005 as a Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites, and it has changed names a few times since. It became a Lexington in 2014. In 2019 a locally owned partnership bought it and called it Lakeshore Hotel & Suites. It took its current name after a renovation that ran into 2021, and in 2022 it joined Best Western’s BW Signature Collection. That brand lets a hotel keep its own name and local ownership while using the Best Western booking and rewards system.
The rooms are what the 2020–21 renovation left: new floors, beds, furniture and bathrooms. The 2022 announcement listed 58 rooms, including 11 suites with a real kitchenette and an in-suite washer and dryer. Breakfast is free, as is parking, and there’s a heated pool, a spa tub and a gym.
It’s not in Scottsdale, it’s not a resort, and nobody comes here for the scene. But if you want a quiet small town at night with Scottsdale 25 minutes away, it does the job well.
How to do Fountain Park Hotel right
Live on the fountain’s schedule. The fountain runs 15 minutes at the top of every hour from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The early show and the last two lit evening shows are the ones day-trippers miss, and you’re across the street. Wind shuts it off, so if one show is cancelled, wait for the next.
Walk everywhere in town. The Fountain Hills Botanical Garden is next door, the Plaza Fountainside shops are across the street, and the Avenue of the Fountains — cafés, pizza, Mexican, a pub and public art — is a block away. That’s dinner most nights. For a bigger meal, drive fifteen minutes west to the Shea corridor, to places like Andreoli and Course.
Use the town’s mornings. McDowell Mountain Regional Park is a short drive north for hiking and mountain biking, and the Sunrise Trailhead on the Scottsdale side looks straight down on the fountain from the ridge. Go at first light from May to September.
Book the busy weekends early. The Fountain Festival arts fair in February, the fall fair, St. Patrick’s Day (when the fountain runs green) and the Fourth of July fill the town and back up Shea. If you’re coming for one of those, this is the room to have, because you won’t need to drive.
Get a suite for long stays. Snowbirds, Mayo Clinic families and anyone staying a week should ask for one of the 11 suites, with a separate bedroom, washer-dryer, induction stovetop and mid-size fridge. No pets, though.
Four names on Saguaro Boulevard
Fountain Hills went decades without a downtown hotel. Robert McCulloch and C.V. Wood built the fountain in 1970 to sell lots, and it worked: the town filled with houses, incorporated at the end of the 1980s, and took over the fountain as a public landmark. Visitors still mostly came for an afternoon. The first hotels opened on the edges of town in the 1990s: a Comfort Inn on Shea in 1996, now the Spark by Hilton, and the Inn at Eagle Mountain by the golf course in 1998.
The hotel across from the park arrived in 2005, at the height of the Valley’s 2000s building boom. It opened as a Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites, a franchise hotel placed beside the town’s main attraction. In 2014 it changed flags to a Lexington Hotel & Suites, a smaller brand.
In August 2019 a locally owned partnership, Fountain Park Hotel LP, bought the hotel and hired Marin Management, a Sausalito company that runs independent and franchise hotels in the West, to manage it. They renamed it Lakeshore Hotel & Suites and redid it room by room through the pandemic: new floors, beds, bathrooms and lobby, with the pool next on the list. The general manager at the time joked about the location in the Fountain Hills Times: “If we were any closer, you’d get wet.”
The final step came in 2022, when the hotel, now Fountain Park Hotel, joined Best Western’s BW Signature Collection. That label lets an independent keep its name and local owners while getting a national reservation system. The current name says what the hotel’s real selling point always was: of all the places to stay in and around Fountain Hills, only this one puts the town’s park, lake and landmark across the street instead of a drive away.
The story is a small one, but it shows how the Scottsdale area’s edge towns grow up. First comes the view, then the houses, then a hotel that is mainly a place to sleep, then local owners who see the location is the asset and rebuild around it.