Among the resort properties in Phoenix the comfortable and nearly-forgotten Cottonwoods is easily my favorite. I feel deep affection for the Cottonwoods, because it offers the best of 'old Scottsdale', which includes a sense of privilege and seclusion, and it is beautiful and offbeat and mysterious.

The Cottonwoods is offically the "Renaissance Scottsdale"; "Cottonwoods" is the old name. "Renaissance Scottsdale" is how you would make your reservations, which is, by the way, strongly recommended. The paradox of this property is that the address is on busy Scottsdale Road, but its 25 acres and 171 guest rooms exist in its own bubble.

The grounds are sensuous and attractive, deep shade on turf hillocks, walking paths interlacing a set of casitas with balconies laid out for privacy, shaded by lattices. There's a nice big pool. This landscape seems dropped in from some other state, from the dry part of Washington state, or west Texas, or New Mexico. Feels like a half-remembered idealized memory of a summer camp somewhere, maybe in Maine.

If it whole thing seems pleasantly artificial, or too good to be true, it is. Every single curve in the landscape calculated out and carved out by a golf-course artist in a small bulldozer. You only have to look at the photo below, where the turf thins out, right there by the ice machine, to see the big contrast between this private pretend environment and the surrounding (true) desert.

Break through the bouganvilla and you'll find remarkably large patches of un-used desert in the rear of the property, a great view of the mountains to the west, a service road surrounding your artificial Logan's Run pleasure-world, and possibly rattlesnakes or javelina. Let's stay in the shade, huh?

There's another weird thing about how this property fits together. The lobby and restaurant and front office are situated in a building out on Scottsdale Road, in the photo below. Live and in person, the lobby building has such a distinct lack of glamor that it's hard to see. Somehow it just doesn't register.

Upon check-in, the guests are directed down a road to reach their rooms. "Go down that road." The road is none too promising-looking, since you roll right by the underground parking for the Borgata, and its employee parking on its dumpster side, but then you see a gateway and a big flowerbed planted with the Renaissance 'R'. Everywhere behind the fence, it's the resort. That's where most of the 25 acres are, and there's plenty of room for an exploratory walk, a good distance away from Scottsdale Road. Probably, probably, the resort parcelled out their big front yard at some point, crowding itself into the back. Happens all the time.

Above is the signature Cottonwoods exterior paint pattern, which appears on the lobby and on every guest room and amenity in the resort, as a way of stopping guests from wandering into nearby private homes.

This marking is necessary because there are strange amenties out in the back yard, entertaining and strange. There's a "Cook-out Corral" for events and parties, equipped with a chuck wagon and several bales of hay and a lot of murderous ranching implements. (The Camelback Inn has a western-themed cook-out area too, but way more elaborate. It's an entire little western town.)

The Corral is attached to what-looks-like a private residence, it must have been built as a home then overtaken by the resort, a sprawling probably-3-bedroom ranch house with a big living rom and with a turf front yard virtually enclosed by bushes, and a fenced-in and locked back yard. It's called "La Hacienda".

Rentable? Undoubtedly.