Carefree Ranch Design Guidelines (Village of Lone Mountain): Height, Setback, and Fee Rules for a Custom Home

If you are building a custom home in Carefree Ranch, in the Village of Lone Mountain near Carefree, the Carefree Ranch Owners Association reviews and approves your design before you build, and its rules are detailed. The community Design Review Committee caps your home at 24 feet above natural grade, breaks it into smaller building masses, sets deep setbacks, and charges published fees. This page explains what those guidelines require, why they exist, and what they mean for a build, so you design to them up front.

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 sit on top of the city or county building codes, and on a hillside desert lot they are usually the tighter constraint.

What the Carefree Ranch guidelines require

The Carefree Ranch Design Guidelines control your home's height, massing, setbacks, schedule, and fees, and a Design Review Committee approves all of it first. Carefree Ranch is a custom-home community in the Village of Lone Mountain, and its design guidelines are the binding rules the committee uses. The signature rule is the sloping-height cap, which limits how tall any point of the home can stand above the original ground:

no portion of the Residence or other Improvements, except for chimneys, may exceed a height of 24 '- 0" above the existing natural grade.

Natural grade is the original ground surface before any cut or fill. So the 24-foot limit is measured straight down from each point of the house to the dirt as you found it, point by point. Here are more of the hard standards:

• Building masses. No single building mass may exceed 16 feet to the top of a flat-roof parapet, or 17 feet 6 inches to a sloping-roof ridge. Up to one-third of the enclosed footprint may go higher, to a maximum of 19 feet flat or 20 feet 6 inches to a ridge. Each home must be broken into at least three visual masses of different heights, or four masses if it is larger than 5,000 square feet.
• Setbacks. The general setback requirements are 60 feet from the street and 35 feet from adjacent lots. These setbacks are administered by the City of Scottsdale, so the City, not the community alone, enforces them.
• Completion deadline. You must finish the exterior of the home (including stucco, paint, windows, doors, and all landscaping) within 549 days of starting construction, unless the committee grants an extension in writing.
• Design review fees. The standard fees are $1,500 for plans plus $500 for the building envelope, payable to the association. Non-standard requests are billed by the association architect at an hourly rate.

When these guidelines come into play

These rules shape both the design and the schedule, so they come into play from the first site plan through the final landscaping. A few common situations:

• You want a tall, prominent home on a knoll. Carefree Ranch is built to discourage that. The 24-foot point-by-point cap, the 16-to-17.5-foot mass limits, and the required three or four separate masses all push the house to step down and blend into the desert rather than dominate a ridge.
• You are buying a lot and pricing the build. The 60-foot street and 35-foot side setbacks shrink the buildable area a lot, and the $1,500 plan fee plus $500 building-envelope fee are real line items on top of the City permit fees.
• Your schedule is tight. The 549-day exterior completion clock starts when you begin construction. A long custom build with delayed landscaping can run up against it, and the association can step in to finish the exterior at your cost if you miss it.

The Design 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 guidelines. Because the City of Scottsdale administers the setbacks and the building permit, the City is the authority having jurisdiction (AHJ) for the permit while the committee judges design fit.

What this means for your build

Design the home in stepped masses from the start, because the 24-foot cap and the 16-to-17.5-foot mass limits will not bend for a tall, single-volume house. On Carefree Ranch's varied terrain, the point-by-point natural-grade measurement matters. For example, on a lot that slopes 6 feet across the building pad, a roofline that reads 20 feet above grade at the high side can measure 26 feet above the natural grade at the low side, which breaks the 24-foot cap even though the house looks one consistent height. Check the grade at each point, not just at the entry. Budget the 60-foot and 35-foot setbacks into your buildable-area math before you fall for a floor plan, and put the $1,500 and $500 fees in your project budget. For how those fees compare across Arizona communities, see how much are HOA design review fees for a custom home in Arizona , and for how the 24-foot cap sits against other gated communities, how tall can a custom home be in a gated or hillside community in Arizona . Build the 549-day exterior deadline into your construction schedule, landscaping included, so a slow finish does not trigger the association's completion remedy.

This is a second approval on top of the City permit. For how that HOA review works in Arizona, including the law that governs it and the on-site inspections, see how HOA design review affects building a custom home . For the City zoning and setbacks that apply underneath these guidelines, see Carefree Residential Zoning and Setbacks , and for the codes your structure is built to, Carefree Adopted Building Codes . For the Scottsdale-area design-review system these communities share, see how HOA and community design review works in Scottsdale .

Source

The height, massing, setback, schedule, and fee rules above come from the Carefree Ranch Owners Association Design Guidelines, Revised July 2019, published through the community's managing agent: View the Carefree Ranch Design Guidelines (PDF) . The Carefree Ranch guidelines are a private, copyrighted association document, quoted here only briefly for accuracy; read the full guidelines at the source.

HOAs revise and re-post these documents, so the version and the file location can change. This page reflects the July 2019 revision. Confirm the current guideline version and the current fee schedule with the Carefree Ranch Design Review Committee or its managing agent before you rely on any number for your plans.