Squaw Peak Inn

The property historically known as the Squaw Peak Inn stands in north-central Phoenix, Arizona, at the foot of the Phoenix Mountains preserve, in one of the desert-edge neighborhoods that developed as the city pushed north from its original Salt River townsite in the early and middle twentieth century. The inn occupies a complex of low Pueblo Revival buildings characteristic of the small private hostelries that catered to seasonal winter visitors to the Salt River Valley before the postwar resort-and-subdivision boom changed the area's lodging economy.

Construction is the typical Phoenix-area combination of stuccoed masonry and stucco over wood frame, finished in the Pueblo Revival vocabulary: low single-story massing, flat parapeted roofs with projecting wooden vigas, deeply recessed openings, small punched windows in deep reveals, and shaded outdoor sitting porches oriented to the surrounding desert. The buildings are organized around an interior courtyard and garden, in the older Hispanic patio manner adapted to the small-resort plan of the early twentieth century.

The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 under reference number 96000760 in recognition of its architectural and tourism-historical significance to mid-century Phoenix. The peak from which it took its name has since been formally renamed Piestewa Peak, though the inn itself retains its registry-period designation.

The inn continues in operation as a small bed-and-breakfast and private lodging property and is open to overnight guests on a reservation basis. Within Arizona's adobe and Pueblo Revival tradition it represents the small-resort residential application of the style to the desert-edge tourist economy of mid-twentieth-century Phoenix — a quiet Pueblo Revival compound whose courtyard plan and stuccoed buildings preserve, on a modest scale, the visual inheritance of the older Sonoran tradition.