George and Dorothy Critchley and their four-legged companion, Wallace, have easily bettered par with their Fountain Hills home.

Wallace is the couple’s white Scottish terrier. He doesn’t golf but likes to tee off at other dogs as their owners walk them along the sidewalks abutting the Critchleys’ home over the second green at Eagle Mountain Golf Club. “She’s named for the great Scottish warrior—you know, Braveheart, from the movie,” Dorothy says.
This is a territory, and a lifestyle, very worth protecting. The Critchleys’ two-level 4,284-sq.-ft. home is etched into a half-acre lot of one of the foothills that characterize the golf club community. East of Scottsdale, Fountain Hills offers residents a bedroom-community option with its undulating desert topography set against nearby Four Peaks and the distant Mazatzal Mountains.
The Critchleys moved into the three-bedroom home three years ago, following two and a half years of design by architect Nick Tsontakis, AIA, and construction by Tom Derryberry’s Scottsdale-based Ultimo Custom Homes. This is the couple’s ninth home, and, as with most of the others, this was built with a focus on innovation and trends-setting.
A former owner of a company serving the hydro-electric dam industry, George has worked in California, Washington and Wyoming as well as in Australia, Brazil and China and in Canada on Vancouver Island. Five years ago, the couple moved to the Valley to semi-retire. Dorothy didn’t like the Vancouver cold. “We saw Scottsdale on television, so I suggested we try here,” George recalls. “So we got a realtor and started looking.” They found a town home just across the Eagle Mountain golf course and bought it. Then, George, always the builder, got the building urge again: “I looked at this lot for a while and knew it was just right, so we bought it.”