Here’s Our First View of the Updated South Lamar and Riverside Hotel

Image: Rhode Partners

Remember the plans for a South Austin condo or apartment building at the southeast corner of South Lamar Boulevard and West Riverside Drive? This long-awaited and occasionally controversial project, first announced in 2013 as a 175-unit residential community, recently returned in the form of a 107-room hotel, also sporting 25 condo units and retail space to boot. (Hotel demand in Austin is seemingly bottomless.)

A view of the corner at South Lamar Boulevard and West Riverside Drive, where a parking lot and long-dead Taco Cabana (and, briefly, a Pollo Tropical) should soon host a hotel and condo development.

After about six years of back-and-forth, this updated version of the concept, now helmed by the somewhat unlikely development team of former Major League Baseball pitcher Huston Street and his mother, Janie, appears nearly ready to roll at the site of the long-dead Taco Cabana at 211 South Lamar Boulevard. There’s no definitive timeline for construction or even an official name for the project at the moment, but we do have a new rendering, courtesy of the architects at local firm Rhode Partners:

The latest view of the hotel and condo project planned at 211 South Lamar Boulevard. Image: Rhode Partners

This version of the building, though it appears to share most of the same beats and eight-story height as the images we saw back in 2013, has a few notable differences. For one, it seems a little less colorful — minimalism never goes out of style. We don’t have images from 2013 that match the exact angle as this new view, but we’ve tried to line them up as best we can so you can spot the differences here and there:

The best comparison we can cobble together from the old and new concepts for the 211 project. Images: Rhode Partners

The changes seem mostly related to the project’s new hotel-dominated usage, like fewer balconies and so forth. Some people might bemoan the apparent lack of color in this new version, but we’re actually kind of glad they’re going with something relatively neutral here. Though we’re pretty well-documented lovers of colorful buildings, the various yellow and brown elements from the original design looked like a bit of a gamble — if the developer decided to cheap out on materials, the whole thing could have ended up looking real bad.

On the top is the original concept for the 211 South Lamar Boulevard development, with the new concept seen on the bottom from a slightly different angle. Images: Rhode Partners

Renderings, however, tend to lie — the new image above, seemingly bathed in the golden light of sunset, makes it kind of hard to see what colors we’re actually working with here. It actually looks like a little bit of yellow or at least a cream-colored yellow made it into the new building, looking at the trim on the sides of the windows facing Riverside Drive, but is that just from the way this 3D model is lit by a fake sunset?

We’ll probably find out soon enough — though we’re not sure when ground’s set to break at the site, the signs of progress on this plan over the last few months make us think it’s happening sooner rather than later.

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