What is Hotel Solaya?
Some Old Town buildings change owners. This one changes identities. Hotel Solaya, which reopened in 2026 under Hyatt’s JdV flag, is the latest name on a 1975 hotel at the north end of the Civic Center, and if you’ve been to Scottsdale before you may know it as The Saguaro, the hotel painted in desert-wildflower colors that was the most photographed facade in the district for a decade.
The paint is gone. The 2025 renovation, designed by Studio 11 and run by Dallas-based Dreamscape Hospitality, traded the saturated primaries for what the hotel calls a Modern Mexican look: warm Sonoran tones, layered textures, sculptural details. The name splices sol, the sun, with Aya, a goddess of the dawn. The 194 rooms and suites were redone, the lobby now holds Common Ground Bistro for coffee and casual meals, and the pool deck kept its cabanas and its bar.
The new anchor is Ella on the Park, which opened in April 2026 with a 360-degree bar and a patio facing the Civic Center lawn. The kitchen leans Southern smokehouse rather than Southwestern, which in a town full of green-chile menus counts as a point of view.
What hasn’t changed is the reason to book it. Scottsdale Stadium is a short walk south across the park, the Main Street galleries are a few blocks west, and the entertainment district is about ten minutes north on foot. The trade is the usual Old Town one: no golf, no gardens, a city block instead of a resort. If you want those, Lincoln Drive is fifteen minutes away and costs a good deal more.
How to do Hotel Solaya right
Decide which March you want. The Giants play spring training at Scottsdale Stadium, a short walk across the park, and Old Town fills on home dates. If that’s your trip, book months ahead and walk to the lawn seats; our spring training guide covers the rest. If it isn’t, come in April, May or October, when the same location costs less and the pool is calmer.
Eat at Ella once, on the patio, at sunset. The kitchen is built around the smoker, the bar seats about thirty in the round, and the patio looks across the Civic Center lawn rather than onto a parking lot. The team priced it for regulars, not anniversaries, so treat it as a neighborhood dinner.
Use the pool as the afternoon. In summer the pool deck, with its cabanas and bar and grill, is the whole middle of the day, per the summer playbook. Mornings and evenings are for walking.
Walk to everything. Coffee at Cartel on Fifth Avenue, the Old Town walk from the front door, AZ88 on the Civic Center for martinis, FnB and Citizen Public House for dinner, the Sugar Bowl for the walk home. You won’t need the car until the Preserve or Taliesin West.
Come back in the fall. In October and November the Arizona Fall League plays at Scottsdale Stadium, the prospects’ league where a ticket costs about what a sandwich does, and the walk over is the same five minutes as in March.
Don’t go looking for the rainbow. Returning Saguaro fans sometimes arrive expecting the old colors. This is a different hotel in the same building, quieter in palette and more polished in finish.
Many names, one curve: the hotel that keeps reinventing itself
The building’s story is a compact history of Old Town hospitality. It opened in 1975 on a 6.6-acre site southwest of Drinkwater Boulevard and Indian School Road, designed by the Valley firm Peter A. Lendrum and Associates as one of the first Doubletree hotels, at the north end of the Civic Center. For nearly three decades it was a chain hotel, reportedly flying Clarion and Holiday Inn flags along the way.
That changed in 2004, when it was gutted and reopened as The James Hotel Scottsdale, the first hotel under the James name. Morgans Hotel Group bought it in 2006 for $47.5 million and relaunched it in January 2007 as the Mondrian Scottsdale, the first Mondrian beyond Los Angeles, with Asia de Cuba as the restaurant and a scene that assumed Scottsdale wanted South Beach. The recession ended that bet. Morgans defaulted on its loan in 2009, GF Management took over in March 2010 and renamed it Hotel Theodore, after Theodore Roosevelt, and the bank took the property back.
In February 2011 New York’s Sydell Group bought it for $16.25 million, hired Joie de Vivre to run it, and spent about $10 million on the version most visitors remember. The Saguaro reopened on November 3, 2011, recolored by the New York architects Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat in carrot orange, violet, larkspur blue, lime and carnation pink, with two pools, one for quiet and one for the party, and Jose Garces’ Distrito and Old Town Whiskey downstairs. Sydell’s pitch was the anti-Mondrian: open to the plaza rather than walled off from it, cheerful rather than exclusive. The Saguaro became an Old Town landmark and the affordable counterpart to the W’s pool scene.
In fall 2022 Sonder turned it into The Monarch, an app-driven hotel. By 2025 new owners, Namastay Development and Hospitality Capital Partners, had lined up roughly $53 million in financing for a full renovation, and the hotel reopened in early 2026 as Hotel Solaya, debuting in April as part of JdV by Hyatt. The flag is a footnote with some irony in it: JdV grew out of Joie de Vivre, the company that had run the Saguaro.
The through line is the one that runs through all of Old Town’s lodging. Scottsdale’s resort identity was built on gardens and casitas, and this hotel, like the W and later Caesars Republic, sells the district itself as the amenity. Each owner has repainted the walls and renamed the restaurant. None could change the address, which is why there keeps being a next owner.