What is Villas of Cave Creek?
Villas of Cave Creek is a timeshare, but a tiny one: 25 two-bedroom townhouses in five two-story buildings on School House Road, a few minutes’ walk from the Cave Creek Museum. Owners and exchange guests use many of the units, and the rest are rented to people who just want a house with a hot tub in Cave Creek for a few nights.
Cave Creek is its own town, not part of Scottsdale — about forty minutes north of Old Town, with saloons instead of nightclubs and desert trails instead of resort corridors.
The villas are the selling point. Each is a two-story townhouse in territorial style with a fully equipped kitchen, two fireplaces, a whirlpool bath, a washer and dryer, and a private backyard with its own spa. Shared amenities are modest but useful: a pool, a 24-hour fitness center, a game room, a playground, barbecue grills and a lobby with a fireplace and free coffee. The resort is managed by Trading Places International, and owners say all 25 units were extensively updated in 2008.
It also takes dogs — one per villa, up to 85 pounds, for a fee — which is rare in this part of the Valley.
Who it’s for: families and two couples who want space and a kitchen, dog owners, and hikers who want Black Mountain and the Spur Cross country close by. Who should look elsewhere: travelers who want daily housekeeping, a staffed desk at midnight, a restaurant on site or resort polish. For that, the Boulders and CIVANA are ten minutes east in Carefree.
How to do Villas of Cave Creek right
Arrange check-in ahead. The front desk keeps limited hours, and the resort asks you to contact it at least 72 hours before arrival to set up check-in. After 8 p.m., you need instructions in advance. Don’t just show up.
Plan to clean up after yourself. There’s no housekeeping. Bring what you need for a self-catering stay, do a grocery run on the drive up Cave Creek Road, and use the kitchen and grills.
Use the backyard spa. It’s yours, not shared, and Cave Creek’s skies are much darker than Scottsdale’s. The stargazing notes explain what to look for.
Walk the town. The Cave Creek Museum, with its restored TB cabin and mining-era stamp mill, is about five minutes on foot. The Black Mountain trail is about ten. The saloons, cantinas and the Buffalo Chip are along Cave Creek Road to the south; walk on a quiet night, drive on a busy one.
Bring the dog, with care. One dog up to 85 pounds is allowed for a per-stay fee. Desert trails get hot early, so walk at sunrise in warm months and watch for cactus spines and rattlesnakes.
Book event weeks early. Twenty-five units go fast during Cave Creek Rodeo Days in late March, Arizona Bike Week in spring and the Hidden in the Hills studio tour around Thanksgiving.
A little timeshare in a town that stayed small
Most of the Valley’s vacation-ownership resorts are big operations near golf courses and shopping, sold by national brands. Villas of Cave Creek is the opposite: two dozen townhouses tucked into a residential street in a town that has spent forty years making sure it doesn’t turn into anything big.
Cave Creek’s story explains why. The town grew out of a mining and ranching camp in the 1870s and 1880s, drew health seekers to desert cabins in the early twentieth century, and became a stop for ranchers and Phoenix day-trippers by the 1930s. As Phoenix and Scottsdale pushed north in the 1980s, residents voted to incorporate in 1986, mostly to control zoning and keep the big lots, horse properties and dirt roads. The same instinct led the town and Maricopa County to preserve Spur Cross Ranch in the 2000s rather than see it subdivided, and Cave Creek Regional Park keeps the west side of town open desert. Hotels never came in numbers. The visitors who stayed overnight mostly found small, independent places — inns, guest ranches, a small hotel on the main street — and a few villa developments like this one.
The timeshare model fits that town better than a hotel would. Twenty-five units owned by people who come back year after year look and behave like a small neighborhood, not a commercial strip. Owners trade their weeks through the big exchange systems, RCI and Interval International, so an owner from a colder state can swap into Cave Creek for a winter week. Trading Places International runs the day-to-day.
What you get is an unglamorous but very Cave Creek kind of stay: your own kitchen and hot tub, a walk to the museum that tells the mining-camp story, Black Mountain over the rooftops, and the saloons down the road. It’s not trying to be Scottsdale, and that’s the point.