What is the Westin Kierland Villas?
The Westin Kierland Villas is the Westin Kierland’s quieter neighbor, and it isn’t really a hotel. It’s a vacation-ownership resort: 158 villas on 10 acres along the Kierland Golf Club, built by Starwood in the mid-2000s and now part of Marriott Vacation Clubs. Owners use most of the weeks, and the villas they aren’t using go out by the night through Marriott, so anyone can stay.
What you get is space. A one-bedroom runs about 530 square feet, or about 870 in the premium version. The two-bedroom lock-off, about 1,400 square feet, sleeps eight and splits into two separate units with a connecting door. The larger villas have full kitchens, fireplaces, whirlpool tubs and Westin’s Heavenly beds. The Villas has its own two pools, one with a kids’ slide and one with cabanas for adults, and Kierland Commons is a short walk away.
The big resort next door has the lazy river, FlowRider, spa and bagpiper, and villa guests get limited access to those amenities. Marriott says that access may be restricted when the resort is busy. That fine print is the most important thing to know before booking.
Who is it for? Families and groups staying a week, golfers who want a kitchen and a fireplace, and snowbirds testing north Scottsdale. Who should skip it: one-night stays, travelers who want full room service and restaurant service, and anyone who chose Kierland just for the Westin’s water park.
How to do the Villas right
Book the lock-off for a group. The two-bedroom villa is two one-bedroom units with a connecting door. One side has the full kitchen and the other a partial one, and each has its own bathroom and sleeper sofa. Two couples or a multigenerational family can share it without sharing everything.
Use the kitchen. A grocery run on the first night turns a week of resort-priced breakfasts into coffee on your own patio. Kierland Commons and Scottsdale Quarter are close enough for dinner on foot: North Italia and The Mission at the Commons, Zinc Bistro and Dominick’s on Scottsdale Road.
Plan for the shared amenities. The Villas’ own pools are where you’ll actually swim. On quiet weeks you may get into the resort’s lazy river; in March and on holiday weekends, don’t count on it. Check the dates of the resort water park’s refurbishment, which Marriott scheduled to begin in September 2026, before booking for the pools.
Walk over for sunset. The Westin’s nightly bagpiper plays the sun down on the resort lawn, a short walk from your villa. A drink at Brittlebush, on the same street as the Villas, makes a good evening.
Golf from the doorstep. The Villas overlook the 27-hole Kierland Golf Club, a forgiving resort course. Book tee times before you arrive in season, when mornings sell out.
Know the timeshare rules. Checkout is 10 a.m., pets aren’t allowed and parking costs extra. It runs like a resort apartment, not a full-service hotel, so plan your own meals.
How a timeshare ended up next to Kierland’s resort
The Villas came out of two booms of the early 2000s: Kierland’s build-out and the rise of hotel-brand timeshares. The land was part of the 730 acres Bob and Kax Herberger bought in the 1950s on the Phoenix side of Scottsdale Road, rezoned under a 1991 master plan with Woodbine Development. The Kierland Golf Club opened in 1996, Kierland Commons in 2000, and the 735-room Westin Kierland Resort in 2002.
In November 2002, the same year the resort opened, Starwood Vacation Ownership announced the Westin Kierland Villas on 10 acres next to it. It was Starwood’s third timeshare resort in Arizona, after the Villas of Cave Creek and the Sheraton Desert Oasis near the Princess, which had both sold out, and its first in the state under the Westin name. Pre-sales started in early 2003, with one-week deeded ownership priced from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties in thousands of dollars. The first phase of 51 two-bedroom villas was scheduled to open in mid-2004, and the final phase of 54 lock-off villas was finished in the mid-2000s, for a total of 158.
The strategy was common at the time. Hotel companies had learned that a timeshare next to a successful resort sold itself: buyers could see the lazy river and the golf course from the sales office.
Then the owners changed. Starwood spun off its timeshare arm in 2016 as Vistana Signature Experiences, which Interval Leisure Group bought. In 2018 Marriott Vacations Worldwide bought ILG, two years after Marriott had bought Starwood itself. That put the Villas and the Westin Kierland Resort back under one corporate family, though they remain separate properties with separate rules, which is why villa guests’ access to the resort is “limited.”
Twenty years on, the Villas shows what happened to Scottsdale’s resort economy after the mega-resorts. New resort-size acreage became too expensive to build on, so developers sold ownership in it instead, one week at a time.