Odd Lodges

odd lodging extraordinary arizona accommodations

If you're willing to give up computerized check-ins and turn-down service and can handle the occasional night in a room that might best be described as “eccentric,” Arizona's more unusual accommodations will let you delve into culture and the arts, find your spiritual self, relive history or enter a world of tomorrow.

shady dell

Baby boomers will dig the trip down memory lane at the Shady Dell, a vintage trailer and RV park in Bisbee featuring eight meticulously restored travel trailers from the 1940s and '50s. Proprietors Rita Personett and Ed Smith collected antiques and turned their hobby into a popular business. They've been renting the restored trailers to overnight guests since 1995. In 1997, they opened Dot's Diner in a 1957 Valentine diner on the property. Mulling the good life over a cup of java or taking a spin on one of the diner's stools, guests and locals alike can grab a great breakfast or lunch. The latest addition to dock at the Dell, a 38-foot Chris-Craft yacht, dates to 1947 and comes complete with a sleeping berth, galley and deck chairs-everything but the ocean. The Shady Dell's trailer accommodations sleep one to three people, and its authentic details range from martini sets to 78-rpm Frank Sinatra records. Videos of old movies may be played on converted vintage televisions. Guests may cook meals in the compact kitchens, also detailed to the era; some of the trailers have their own toilets and sinks. There's a bathhouse on the premises for showers.

O.K. Street Jail House INN

The Shady Dell's trailers have played host to groups of nostalgic friends who rent all the units, don '50s garb and relive the days of Elvis for a weekend. Personett and Smith are happy to oblige.

o.k. street jailhouse

Being friendly and downright hospitable was not in the original plan for the O.K. Street Jailhouse, built in downtown Bisbee in 1904. The two-story jail-with a jailer's office and drunk tank downstairs and an upstairs cell for the more devious criminals-was built to replace the old wooden jails that seemed to encourage breakouts. The new jail, with its iron-reinforced block walls, was virtually impervious to escapes.

It wasn't impervious to growth, however, and by 1915, Bisbee needed a bigger jail for its growing guest population. The O.K. Street Jailhouse sat empty for a while, then housed a bookstore and an art gallery. In 1989, a Tucson couple bought it and transformed it into a vacation rental.

You can now be sentenced to spend the night, the week or several months in the O.K. Street Jail-a compact living room and full kitchen have rehabilitated the downstairs drunk tank, and a skylit bedroom and full bath now transform the upstairs. The old iron bars remain to remind you of your lodging's history. There's also a cardboard replica of John Wayne in the living room. Local rumor says the Duke was an owner of the jail at one time.

franciscan renewal center

At the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, people who spend the night are searching for more than just a place to sleep. They come singly or in groups seeking spiritual direction, a respite from the modern world and personal peace. They are, in short, retreatants.

The center, also known as the Casa de Paz y Bien (in Spanish, the House of Peace and All Good), operated as the Kachina Lodge during the 1940s; in 1951, the Franciscans of the Santa Barbara Province bought the 25-acre site and its buildings and created a compound for retreats, workshops and inner renewal.

The center's 56 rooms, simple but spacious, have private baths and queen or double beds. Guests can relax at the pool, and room rates include three buffet meals a day served in the main dining room.

Those guests making a retreat are offered spiritual direction, which can include dailycounseling, reading materials and audio tapes, and they may attend daily Mass in the main chapel or seek quiet reflection in a smaller chapel. If there's space available, guests may join in a workshop or other programs, which can range from tai chi and anger management to Franciscan spirituality and the study of the saints. The desert grounds encourage peaceful strolls, and most visitors enjoy meditatively walking the labyrinth, made of stones set into the sandy earth at the back of property.

[LEFT AND THIS PAGE] Lawabiding folks can rent a night's repose in Bisbee's O.K. Street Jailhouse, where the really bad guys used to be locked away from the genteel citizens.

Retreatants range from 20-somethings to retirees.

biosphere 2 center

At the futuristic Biosphere 2 Center in Oracle, you don't actually spend the night in the Biosphere's glassed-enclosed habitats. Nobody has since the last "Biospherians" left the sealed experimental world in 1994 and the entire facility, 35 miles north of Tucson, was taken over by Columbia University in 1996 and turned into its Western Campus for Earth Systems Research. Instead, overnight visitors stay in low-slung, hillside casitas, originally built in the 1970s when the whole property was once a large corporation's executive retreat.

Nicely furnished, 27 spacious suites offer patio views of the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Sonoran Desert and the sculpted domes and pyramid of Biosphere 2. A pool and workout room are among the amenities, and the center's guests can enjoy breakfast, lunch and dinner at the on-site Cañada del Oro Restaurant. There are several souvenir shops and a cafe for lighter fare on the property.

The main attraction, of course, is a tour of the campus, a 3.5-acre ecological laboratory involved in science research. The tour is included with general admission and takes a good chunk of a morning or afternoon. You get to see the prototype building for the Biosphere, check out the former living quarters of the Biospherians and walk around the exterior of the habitat areas. The recently opened “World of Discovery” tour allows visitors, for the first time, inside the various wilderness areas that make up the Biosphere 2 laboratory and adds about an hour to the tour time.

arcosanti

Science, art and urban experimentation provide the backdrop for a stay at Arcosanti, the experimental community that architect/ futurist/philosopher/author Paolo Soleri has been building on a mesa near central Arizona's Cordes Junction since 1970.

Arcosanti's 10 guest rooms nestle at the bottom of a hillside. Some, small and basic, have shared baths; others have private baths. The cast-concrete rooms are not air-conditioned, but guests may use the swimming pool. A small, two-bedroom apartment, dubbed the Sky Suite because of its upperlevel location and great views, has enough beds and roll-out mats to accommodate several guests.

The café and bakery at Arcosanti offer buffet meals for its overnight visitors. On Saturday and Sunday nights, dinner is notavailable on site, but you can tool down the road to eat in Cordes Junction. Several enterprising Arcosanti residents also have set up a mini-mart, where you can snap up toiletries and snacks during its limited hours of operation.

Construction continues on Soleri's prototype city of earthcast forms, so jackhammers and nailing can start early in the morning. The project maintains a population of about 80, allowing visitors to experience firsthand an experiment in community living, minus the city crowds.

Before you retire for the night, take the one-hour tour that explains the practicality of the city's plan and building designs. You may view the foundry where Arcosanti's signature windbells are made, and check out the gallery with changing exhibitions in the upstairs visitors center. From May through

[THIS PAGE] In Arcosanti, visitors experience a prototype community designed by visionary architect Paolo Soleri. The sale of the famous Soleri bells helps finance the construction of environmentally compatible utilitarian buildings.

GENERATING PLANT HILLSIDE PRESS

November, the Cosanti Foundation hosts monthly concerts, ranging from classical to jazz, preceded by a tour and a special dinner. Some overnighters like to hike or birdwatch the local highlands.

Northwest of Wickenburg, visitors might do a double-take upon seeing a thriving 1880s mining town just off a lonely stretch of highway, tucked into the base of the Harcuvar Mountains. Robson's Mining World thrives today, but no longer as an actual goldmining town. Jeri and Charles Robson, who run a family honey and pollen-product business in nearby Aguila, have carefully reconstructed what had been a ghost town since World War II. The resurrected "community," sporting its authentic gold-mining past, lives once more, this time around as a tourist stop complete with food, lodging and recreation. When they bought the land-20 acres near a gold mine with claims dating back to 1917-the Robsons intended to create a mining museum. The couple, longtime collectors of Arizona antiques and particularly mining equipment, set up their collections, restored the old buildings and built a three-story boardinghouse for overnight guests. They opened for business in 1992.

robson's mining world

Litsch's Bed & Breakfast, the 26-room wooden boardinghouse, has simple rooms with a cabin's rustic ambiance; queen, double or twin beds; and private baths. Most have views of the surrounding saguaro cactus forest. Room rates include breakfast, and you can buy lunch in the "town's" Gold Leaf Cafe. If you make a reservation in advance, the cook also will fix dinner.

Fill your day with hiking, panning for gold or meandering through Mining World's 30 or so buildings that have been stuffed with antiques and artifacts. Check out the offerings in the old grocery store, gaze upon the gizmos at the old beauty parlor and treat yourself at the ice-cream parlor and gift shop.

red garter bed and bakery

Learn more about yesteryear's-ahemadult wildlife, shall we say, by spending the night at the Red Garter Bed and Bakery in downtown Williams. Built in 1897 as a saloon with furnished rooms upstairs, the two-story brick building was one of several saloons serving the railroad across the street. The phrase "furnished rooms," however, demurely advertised the saloon's popular bordello, which attracted the local railroaders, loggers and cattlemen until about 1940. Innkeeper John Holst bought the building in 1979. It had gone through several incarnations, including life as a warehouse, general store and rooming house. Also a carpenter who has completed many restorations in northern Arizona, Holst spent several years fixing up the old saloon while researching its history and that of downtown Williams. He opened the restored Victorian Roman-esque building first as a deli and barbecue restaurant. Then in 1994, having converted three of the upstairs rooms of ill repute into perfectly proper sleeping quarters, he started the bed and breakfast. Holst added a fourth room, and the old saloon downstairs now serves as a cozy gift shop and bakery, which turns out scones, cinnamon rolls and muf-fins. Overnighting at the Red Garter includes a continental breakfast and a lot of goodies fresh from the bakery.

If you find you have an urge to lean out your window and wave at the passing trains in memory of the shady ladies who worked the rooms decades ago, it's likely that those waving back to you will be fellow tourists, bound for the Grand Canyon. If you want to join them for a jaunt to the Canyon, you can board at the Grand Canyon Railway depot-still just across the street. Pick a pursuit, fulfill a need, explore an era, have some fun. Build a trip around some of Arizona's more unusual lodgings, and you can experience it all. AHNora Burba Trulsson of Scottsdale is co-author of Living Homes: Sustainable Architecture and Design (Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2001). She prefers her travels and her lodgings to be unusual.

While working on this story, Terry Moore became a stronger, better person after spending the night in a spartan, low-budget room with no heating or air conditioning at Arcosanti. His home in Tucson is equipped with all the modem conveniences.