Troon North Design Guidelines (Scottsdale): Building Envelope, Color, and Wall Rules for a Custom Home

If you are building a custom home in Troon North in north Scottsdale, the community's Architectural Review Committee approves your design before the City will, and its first rule is where on the lot you may build at all. Troon North requires every home to sit inside a recorded Building Envelope, with the surrounding desert protected and left untouched. On top of that, it controls your paint color, your grading, and your walls. This page explains what the Troon North standards require, why they exist, and what they mean for a build.

This page is part of the Jematell community design guidelines library, our plain-language reading of the design rules that guard-gated and master-planned communities in our service area enforce on custom homes. These community rules layer on top of the city building codes, and on a desert lot they are usually the tighter limit.

What the Troon North standards require

The Troon North Architectural Review Committee Standards and Procedures control where your home sits, how it grades the land, and what it looks like, and the committee reviews all of it before you build. The foundation of the whole document is the Building Envelope, the approved area of the lot where your house and improvements must stay:

Outside the Building Envelope, the natural desert must be left undisturbed.

That envelope is not just a guideline. The City of Scottsdale records it as a Natural Area Easement over the part of the lot that has to stay natural, and changing the envelope means a formal amendment with the City. So the protected desert is locked in by a recorded legal interest, not just a community rule. Here are more of the hard standards:

• Paint color. External materials must generally be earth tones, and the body color must have a Light Reflective Value (LRV) between 14 and 40. LRV is a 0-to-100 scale for how much light a color reflects, so the 14-to-40 band rules out both very dark and pale or bright bodies and keeps homes in muted desert tones.
• No reflective finishes. Highly reflective finishes are banned on exterior surfaces, including roofs, fascia, trim, railings, retaining walls, doors, fences, piping, and exterior equipment. Glass may not be mirrored and may not exceed 50 percent reflectivity.
• Grading and fill. A maximum of two feet of un-retained fill will be approved, and then only if the grading conditions are met. The standard is to follow the natural contours, not build up a pad.
• Walls. Site and retaining walls may not exceed eight feet in height, and a wall may not average more than six feet. Walls must stay inside the Building Envelope and match the home's color standards.

The committee also requires the home be designed by an architect registered in the State of Arizona, and it runs formal on-site inspections during construction, including a setback and retaining-wall inspection before the pad is poured.

When these standards come into play

These standards shape the site plan before the floor plan is final, so they come into play the moment you start laying out a home on a Troon North lot. A few common situations:

• You want the house spread across the whole lot. You cannot. Everything (house, pool, patio, walls) must fit inside the recorded Building Envelope, and the desert outside it stays undisturbed. The envelope, not the property line, is your real building boundary.
• Your lot needs grading to level a pad. Troon North caps un-retained fill at two feet. A design that trucks in fill to flatten a sloped lot will be sent back to follow the natural contours or to use approved retaining instead.
• You picked a dark, dramatic, or bright body color. If its LRV falls outside 14 to 40, the committee will reject it. The palette stays in earth tones.

The Architectural Review Committee is the community's design review committee (DRC) , and it reviews against the CC&Rs (the recorded covenants you agreed to at purchase) and these standards. The recorded desert area is held by a Natural Area Easement , a legal right that keeps that ground in its natural state. For what that recorded envelope and easement mean for a buyer, see what is a building envelope or NAOS easement on an Arizona custom lot .

What this means for your build

Start your site plan from the Building Envelope, not the lot lines, because the envelope is the only ground you can actually build, grade, or pave. For example, on a one-acre Troon North lot the recorded envelope might cover well under half the parcel, so your house, garage, driveway, pool, and walls all have to fit in that smaller shape, and the rest stays desert under the easement. Design the home to the natural slope rather than a built-up pad, since the two-foot fill cap will block a large pad. Choose your body color inside the 14-to-40 LRV band, and keep walls at or under eight feet. For how that band compares across communities, see what are LRV paint color rules in North Scottsdale luxury communities , and for the matching roof rules, what roof types and slopes do luxury Arizona communities allow . Hire an Arizona-registered architect, which the standards require anyway, and confirm your builder holds an Arizona contractor's license, as covered in do I have to use an approved builder list in a gated Arizona community .

This is a second approval on top of the City permit. For how that HOA review works in Arizona, including the governing law and the on-site inspections, see how HOA design review affects building a custom home . The City overlay that drives the Building Envelope and Natural Area Easement is explained in how HOA and community design review works in Scottsdale . For the City zoning that sets your base setbacks, see Scottsdale Residential Zoning and Setbacks , and for the codes your plans are checked against, Scottsdale Adopted Building Codes .

Source

The Building Envelope, color, fill, and wall rules above come from the Troon North Association Architectural Review Committee Standards and Procedures, Revised May 20, 2025: View the Troon North ARC Standards and Procedures (PDF) . The Troon North standards are a private, copyrighted association document, quoted here only briefly for accuracy; read the full standards at the source.

HOAs revise and re-post these documents, and management portals sometimes move the file. This page reflects the May 20, 2025 revision. Confirm the current version with the Troon North Architectural Review Committee before you rely on any number for your plans.