1971 NW Keenan Court

Ask what Awbrey Butte actually offers and the answer is elevation. The butte is the highest landmass inside Bend's city limits, its summit at 4,230 feet, sitting in the city's northwest quadrant about 3 miles from downtown by way of NW Newport Avenue. Homes on the west side look across the Cascade Range from Mount Jefferson to Mount Bachelor. Homes on the east side look down on downtown's grid, the Old Mill smokestacks, and Pilot Butte. The drive to downtown runs about 10 minutes, Old Mill District about 12, and Mount Bachelor about 25 by way of Cascade Lakes Highway. That combination, close enough for a weeknight dinner downtown, high enough to sit above the traffic and the noise, is what people are actually buying when they buy on the butte.

The neighborhood exists because Brooks Resources bought 1,800 acres on the butte in 1970 and treated it as a decades-long project rather than a quick build-out. The company broke ground on homesites in 1984 and kept building until the last of 782 homesites was in place by 2005. The design choices from that process still define the place: large lots that leave mature ponderosa pines standing, roads routed around the hillside so they stay largely out of view from below, and a house-color requirement that limits new construction to earth-tone exteriors. It is a low-density neighborhood built inside a city, on purpose, not a subdivision that happened to end up wooded.