A Hotel Brand Built on Staying Low to the Ground Just Opened Sixteen Floors Above Austin

A brand whose houses in South Beach and Brooklyn Bridge top out at a few storeys has just taken a piece of the sky.

1 Hotel Austin opens this month inside the Waterline, the 74-storey tower that has made Austin, not Houston or Dallas, home to the tallest building in Texas. The address sits at the confluence of Waller Creek and Lady Bird Lake, a stretch of waterfront the tower's developers — Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential — are pitching as a reconnection of downtown Austin to the water it had mostly turned its back on. The hotel takes 252 rooms, including 60 suites, with the floor-to-ceiling glass, planted balconies and reclaimed-wood interiors that have defined the Barry Sternlicht-founded brand since its first house opened in South Beach in 2015.

The tension worth noting is the one the brand has never quite faced before: 1 Hotels has built its identity on staying close to the ground, on buildings that read as an extension of landscape rather than an interruption of it. Its Austin address occupies floors inside a supertall instead. The hotel is answering the height with a wellness floor rather than a view line — a 2,000-square-foot fitness centre, a yoga studio, and an outpost of Bamford Wellness Spa, developed with Carole Bamford, whose treatment rooms take their cue from Hill Country bathhouses rather than the tower around them.

The kitchen is the sharper story. Alteño, the hotel's signature restaurant, is led by Johnny Curiel, a James Beard Award nominee whose Denver restaurant Alma Fonda Fina holds a Michelin star. Curiel is cooking the food of Jalisco's Highlands, in homage to his father — an alteño, a highlander, in the term the restaurant borrows for its name — with pan de elote and pollo a las brasas on the early menu. Sixteen floors up, Watr closes the day with a Japanese-leaning rooftop menu and a view of the skyline the hotel otherwise declines to make its main event.

Whether a brand defined by staying low reads differently once it has a rooftop is the question Austin will answer before any other 1 Hotels address does.

Image: Congress Avenue Bridge over Lady Bird Lake, downtown Austin — the stretch of waterfront where the Waterline tower now stands. The tower itself, completed in 2026, does not yet have a rights-cleared photograph publicly available.

— Camille