What is Papago Scottsdale?
Papago Scottsdale by Reside is the kind of place Scottsdale mostly bulldozed: a two-story, mid-century motor inn with rooms opening onto walkways around a courtyard pool, on McDowell Road just west of Scottsdale Road. It survived. After a 2023 renovation and a 2025 relaunch under Wyndham’s Trademark Collection, it has turquoise walls, mid-century furniture, poolside cabanas, a fire pit and a vintage Airstream trailer parked out front.
The hotel has 70 rooms and suites, each with a mini-fridge, microwave and coffee maker. There’s a heated pool, a small fitness center and a coffee bar. It’s family-friendly and takes small dogs. Nobody will mistake it for a resort, and the location on busy McDowell Road at the southern edge of south Scottsdale isn’t glamorous. For a reasonable price, though, you get an actual mid-century building rather than a theme-park version of one.
Then there’s the restaurant. Hai Noon, the on-site restaurant, is run by Nobuo Fukuda, the chef who won a James Beard Award in 2007 at Sea Saw, his 28-seat counter in Old Town. He opened Hai Noon here quietly in 2023, in a dim, rock-walled room, and PHOENIX magazine named it the best new restaurant of the year. People who would never think of sleeping in a south Scottsdale motor inn drive across the Valley to eat dinner here.
Its many names (Best Western, Magnuson, Ascend, Sonder, Reside) tell the story of a small independent motel changing hands as the McDowell corridor around it fell and came back.
How to do Papago Scottsdale right
Reserve Hai Noon first. The restaurant is small and serves dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday. If eating there is part of the reason you’re staying, lock in the table before the room. Being able to walk back to bed after a Fukuda dinner is the hotel’s single best perk.
Choose your room by sound. As at most motor inns, rooms open to the outdoors rather than an interior corridor, so you’ll hear the pool and the road more than you would in a tower hotel. Light sleepers should ask for a room on the quiet side, away from McDowell Road and the pool deck.
Use the neighborhood. You’re a short walk from the new Papago Plaza and from SkySong across Scottsdale Road, and Fate Brewing is close by. Papago Park, the red buttes the hotel is named after, along with the Desert Botanical Garden and the Phoenix Zoo, is a few minutes west. Old Town is about two miles north.
Bring the dog, not the Great Dane. Dogs up to 40 pounds are welcome for an extra fee.
Plan for parking. On-site parking is available but not free, so confirm the rate.
Spring training. The Giants play at Scottsdale Stadium, about two miles north. With the Loop 202 and Loop 101 nearby, the inn is an easy, inexpensive base for a week of driving between Cactus League ballparks.
The motor inn that outlived the strip
The Papago’s exact birth year is fuzzy. Hotel listings give 1958. A 2014 report on its sale called it about 50 years old, and a 2023 restaurant review called it a ‘60s-era motor lodge. What’s certain is what it was built for. In the mid-century boom, McDowell Road was south Scottsdale’s main road, soon lined with car dealerships known as the Motor Mile. Just east of the inn, the pueblo-style Papago Plaza opened at the corner in 1962, and Los Arcos Mall followed across Scottsdale Road in 1969. A two-story courtyard motel with a pool was exactly what drivers and snowbirds arriving on that road wanted.
The name points west to Papago Park and the buttes beyond the city line. “Papago” was the Spanish-era name for the Tohono O’odham, who dropped it in 1986. The Valley kept it on a park, a freeway, a plaza and this inn, a history the site covers in our lexicon.
For years the property ran as the Best Western Papago Inn: 58 rooms, a courtyard with mature trees and a bird aviary, and owners who eventually retired. By then south Scottsdale had slid. The malls emptied, the money went north, and McDowell Road became a corridor the city studied rather than celebrated. In late 2014, Bret and Patricia Wirta, hoteliers from Washington state, bought the inn with an AVANA Capital loan that also covered renovations, and reflagged it as the Magnuson Hotel Papago Inn. The Scottsdale Independent treated the deal as evidence that the McDowell corridor was turning around, with SkySong already open across the road.
The flags kept changing. In November 2019 it became Papago Inn, an Ascend Hotel Collection member under Choice Hotels. That year Papago Plaza next door was demolished for apartments and a new SpringHill Suites. Next it became Sonder The Mariposa, also marketed as the Papago Motor Hotel, with a renovation finished in 2023. That same year Fukuda and the team behind Phoenix’s Welcome Diner opened Hai Noon, a serious kitchen in a place nobody expected one. In 2025, Reside, a Seattle-based residential hospitality company in a ten-year alliance with Wyndham, relaunched the 70-room inn as Papago Scottsdale under the Trademark Collection.
Scottsdale’s grand mid-century resorts, such as the Safari, mostly fell to redevelopment, and Hotel Valley Ho is the exception. The Papago is the humbler survivor. It was never a landmark, and it lasted because it stayed small enough to keep changing owners and brands.