What is the Inn at Eagle Mountain?
Drive east on Shea past the Mayo Clinic and over the low south end of the McDowells, and before you reach the center of Fountain Hills a road climbs to the right into the Eagle Mountain neighborhood. Near the top, beside the 18th fairway of Eagle Mountain Golf Club, is a small cluster of low buildings with balconies facing the desert. That is the Inn at Eagle Mountain: 37 suites, opened in 1998, and still one of the few hotels in a town that is mostly houses.
It isn’t in Scottsdale, and it doesn’t need to be. The town line is just behind you to the west, the Shea corridor is ten minutes away, and Old Town is about 25. What you get for the drive is quiet. You won’t hear Scottsdale Road traffic, see an airport flight path or hear a pool DJ — just a golf course falling away below you and Red Mountain and the Valley spread out to the southwest.
Every room is a suite, and every suite has the same three things that make the place: a kiva-style gas fireplace, a large whirlpool tub and a private balcony or patio. Add Pietro’s, the Italian dinner room, the Desert Decanter tasting room in the lobby — fitting, since the owner is Napa vintner John Komes of Flora Springs — a small full-service spa and no resort fee.
It’s for couples, golfers, and anyone visiting the Mayo Clinic who wants calm close by. Families with young children and travelers who want to walk to bars should stay elsewhere.
How to do the Inn at Eagle Mountain right
Pick your suite by layout and view. King Suites (about 470 square feet) suit couples, and Deluxe Queens (about 490, two queen beds) suit friends or a parent and child. The Luxury Suites, at more than 750 square feet with a separate living room, are worth it for a long stay. Ask for a balcony looking west over the course: the sunset, then the fire, then the stars.
Plan dinner around Pietro’s hours. The Italian restaurant serves Wednesday to Sunday evenings, with the patio as the best seat. On Monday and Tuesday, eat early at the Grille at Eagle Mountain Golf Club (open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.) or drive ten minutes to the patios on the Avenue of the Fountains. For a serious dinner, Course and the rest of the Shea corridor are fifteen minutes west.
Play the course you’re sleeping on. Eagle Mountain is a par-71 Scott Miller design from 1996, with up to 300 feet of drop from some tees to the fairways and views across the Valley. Pair it with the Nation’s two courses at We-Ko-Pa, twenty minutes east, for a three-course trip.
Use the town at night. Fountain Hills is a certified Dark Sky community, so a few minutes away from the inn’s lights the sky gets very dark. Our stargazing guide has the spots. The fountain goes off every hour until 9 p.m.
Know what it isn’t. It’s two stories with outdoor corridors, and the upper floors are reached by stairs only. Ask for the ground floor if steps are a problem.
The second hotel in a fountain town
Fountain Hills started as a sales pitch. In 1970, chainsaw maker Robert P. McCulloch and his partner C.V. Wood built a lake and a fountain that could throw water about 560 feet. It was the tallest in the world at the time, and it was there to get people to drive out past the McDowells and buy lots. It worked, and the town filled with homes. What it didn’t get, for a long time, was places to stay. For a quarter century, visitors who came to watch the fountain drove back over the ridge to sleep in Scottsdale.
The 1990s changed that. The town had incorporated at the end of the 1980s, Scottsdale had annexed the East Shea corridor toward it in the 1970s, and since 1987 the Mayo Clinic’s Scottsdale campus had been sending patients and families along Shea every day. In 1996 the town’s first hotel opened on Shea; it’s now the Spark by Hilton. The same year Eagle Mountain Golf Club opened on the hills at the southwest edge of town: a Scott Miller course across box canyons and ridges, which the Arizona Republic named the state’s best new course. Two years later, in 1998, the Inn at Eagle Mountain opened on its 18th fairway with 37 suites.
The inn was small, independent and inward-looking from the start. Fountain Hills’ resort moment came from other places: CopperWynd up on Eagle Ridge in 1997, which became ADERO in 2020, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s Radisson in 2005, now We-Ko-Pa. The inn kept to a fireplace-and-whirlpool formula that hasn’t needed much change.
Its current owner explains its current personality. John Komes founded Flora Springs in the Napa Valley and owns other wine labels, and he has said he wants the inn to carry the same warm, generous, boutique spirit into a Southwestern setting. Hence the lobby tasting room and the Italian kitchen.
What the Inn at Eagle Mountain shows about Scottsdale is a pattern visitors miss. The city’s edges are full of small towns that grew up selling a view, and the quietest places to stay are often just past the city limit. Here, the view of Red Mountain at sunset is the same one Fountain Hills was built to sell.