What is the Kimpton Miralina?
Ask a longtime local for directions to the Kimpton Miralina and you’ll get a beat of silence, then: “Oh — the Plaza.” For nearly fifty years, The Scottsdale Plaza Resort was one of the corridor’s fixed stars: a 42-acre, Spanish-Mediterranean garden property at Scottsdale Road and the Paradise Valley line, built in phases from 1976 and run for decades as a proudly independent, family-owned operation while the chains consolidated everything around it.
The Plaza’s formula was generous scale without pretension — 400-plus rooms and villas, five pools, fountained courtyards, tennis, lawns that hosted half the Valley’s weddings, and Remington’s, the wood-paneled piano lounge where Scottsdale celebrated its anniversaries and closed its deals over prime rib. It was never the flashiest address on the road; it was the one everyone actually used.
The new chapter arrived mid-decade: institutional owners acquired the property in 2024, and in 2025 IHG announced its conversion to the market’s first Kimpton — the brand that invented the American boutique hotel — as the Miralina Resort & Villas, taking guests from January 2026. The bet is straightforward: keep the irreplaceable part (42 acres of mature gardens ten minutes from Old Town) and upgrade the replaceable part (interiors, restaurants, brand power).
For travelers, that makes the Miralina the corridor’s interesting wildcard — big-resort acreage and mountain views at a moment when the name is new enough that pricing hasn’t caught up to the renovation.
How to do the Miralina right
Use the acreage. Forty-two acres means the property has neighborhoods. Villa and garden sections deep in the grounds trade walk-time for genuine quiet; rooms near the main buildings put pools and dining at your elbow. Say which you want — at this scale, room assignment is the experience.
Time the rebrand economics. A property relearning its market name typically prices soft for its first seasons while loyalists of the old identity drift and new audiences discover it. Renovated-room quality at repositioning rates is the classic play here; it won’t last once the Kimpton flag beds in.
Pool-hop deliberately. Five pools historically meant you could always find an empty one — the Plaza’s best-kept secret. Scout them your first morning and claim the quiet one as yours.
Honor the ghosts, then eat around. Remington’s anchored this corner’s dining memory for decades; whatever the space has become, raise a glass to it. Beyond the gates you’re at the resort corridor’s crossroads: El Chorro five minutes west, Lincoln Drive’s classics all around, Old Town’s full grid ten minutes south.
Group-trip it. The Plaza’s DNA — lawns, ballrooms, villa clusters, pool count — made it the Valley’s reunion-and-wedding workhorse, and the bones still favor groups: multigenerational trips fit here better than at almost any boutique property in town.
The last independent: how the Plaza held out, and why it finally didn’t
The Scottsdale Plaza’s origin sits in the same mid-1970s wave that produced the Registry (1977) and the Scottsdale Conference Center (1976): the moment Scottsdale’s resort economy graduated from winter-season inns to year-round, group-capable operations. What set the Plaza apart was governance. While the Registry cycled through bankruptcy and flags, and nearly every peer sold to a chain, the Plaza stayed family-held for the better part of five decades — locally managed, incrementally improved, allergic to fads. That independence produced its distinct texture: staff tenure in decades, repeat guests in generations, and institutions like Remington’s that belonged to the city as much as the hotel.
Independence was also, eventually, the vulnerability. The 2020s resort market rewards either intimate-boutique or brand-networked scale; a 400-room independent occupies the expensive middle — too big to be a jewel, too unflagged to feed from loyalty networks, and sitting on 42 acres of land whose value kept whispering alternatives. The 2024 sale to institutional investors (a Trinity Investments-led venture) followed the corridor’s familiar script. What didn’t follow the script was demolition: unlike the Registry or La Posada, the Plaza’s second act keeps the resort a resort.
The Kimpton choice is strategically elegant. IHG’s luxury-lifestyle brand built its name on exactly this maneuver — taking characterful, unfashionable buildings and making them the cool kid — and had conspicuously never planted a resort flag in this market. “Miralina” gives the corridor a fresh name wrapped around familiar bones: the mature gardens, the five pools, the Camelback-and-Mummy sightlines that 1976 money bought and 2026 money couldn’t assemble.
The open questions are honest ones: conversions reveal their compromises over a few seasons, and a beloved local identity — the Plaza name meant something at Valley dinner tables — doesn’t transfer automatically. But the underlying asset is the point. In a market where 42 contiguous resort acres at the Lincoln junction can never be created again, the Plaza’s story was never going to end. It just changed its name — for the first time in fifty years.