Travel Tips & Adventures

When you’ve finished visiting Old Town Scottsdale and Scottsdale Fashion Center, there is more shopping up the road!  Shopping in Scottsdale could be a daily experience for weeks and you might still not see everything!

Traveling up Scottsdale Road, you see other major retailers like Crate & Barrel, restaurants like Cheesecake Factory, and several shopping plazas.  Although it might seem counterintuitive with Arizona’s months of extreme heat, most of the newer shopping locations are open air centers  where you travel outside from shop to shop.

A street in Kierland Commons

Banana Republic in Kierland Commons

Take Kierland Commons.  It is an extremely upscale shopping area that resembles a small city with multiple blocks of shops and restaurants.  Called a “mixed use” center, it also has some pricey places for people to reside (not just live, note, but “reside”) so they are just above or down the street from the retail locations of their choice.  Kierland Commons has retail establishments not found just anywhere like Restoration Hardware; Tommy Bahama’s Restaurant, Bar and Store;  7 for All Mankind; and other unique brands – plus a few people would know like White House/Black Market, Sur La Table, and Morton’s, the Steakhouse.  In other words, bring plastic and lots of it!

There are some even newer centers recovering from the economic boom that slowed down occupancy like the Scottsdale Quarter that was a sensation when H & M moved in with their trendy and reasonably priced fashion.  There is a large Apple Store and a unique Williams Sonoma Home.  We were surprised to walk in and find furnishings – couches and other furniture galore in room arrangements – instead of the kitchen gadgets and cookbooks we had expected.   The staff were obviously used to that reaction as they explained that their more traditional store was at Scottsdale Fashion Square.  Scottsdale Quarter bills itself as an “open air urban lifestyle center.”

H & M's trendy store in Scottsdale Quarter

Even the grocery store is not the ordinary convenience store married with catering.  The Oakville Grocery has high-end nibbles, a bakery, wine selections and a small deli with a few tables for someone who might like to grab something with friends.  A “coming soon” eatery is “True Food Kitchen” which is in the Phoenix Biltmore area and features regional sourced food and elegant presentations in a trendy, ultramodern eatery.

With all this talk of food, I’m getting hungry, so I’m off to make dinner.  Needless to say, I’ve barely touched on all of the shopping locations in Scottsdale Arizona.  However, next week I’ll be back to shamelessly promote my new book —–

Come back next week and I’ll share more as I’m just days away from launching – Hiking for the Couch Potato: A Guide for the Exercise Challenged. It is a humorous book suitable for gift-giving!  Get ready to join the community!

Tags: Arizona, Book launch, Food, Restaurants, Romantic Travel, Shopping

This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Arizona, Food, Scottsdale, Shopping, Southwest, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.