Looking up at the Hotel ZaZa / Gables Republic Square tower from Guadalupe Street. Photo by James Rambin.
Remember the Hotel ZaZa and Gables Republic Square project at 401 Guadalupe Street? First announced nearly seven years ago, the timeline of this 24-story hotel and apartment project one block east from Republic Square Park has been fairly long by Austin standards, but we’re expecting its opening relatively soon.
A rendering of the project, as seen from Republic Square Park. Pretty close to what we ended up with, right? I almost think the actual building looks better than this. Image: Ziegler Cooper Architects
Representatives of the project have slyly told us it’s expected to open sometime during football season, and that could mean anything from September to the Super Bowl — still, it’s nice to see something happening over here, since the building’s brick exterior is very attractive and has a kind of timeless yet postmodern architectural vibe we don’t see much of in new construction downtown.
And speaking of bricks, we couldn’t help but notice during our jaunts around the city over the long holiday weekend that the restored facade of the Ginger Man, a craft beer joint formerly located on part of the project’s site facing Fourth Street, is now visible on the side of the new building:
Looking towards the southern frontage of the ZaZa / Gables project facing Fourth Street, with elements of the old Ginger Man bar’s facade incorporated into the new building. Photo by James Rambin.
The old bar was demolished all the way back in 2014 in preparation for the project, but maintaining elements of its facade and integrating its architecture into the new building was something the ZaZa / Gables developers agreed to in 2013, in order to secure a rezoning by City Council that provided the extra height the tower needed.
The Ginger Man as seen in 2007 at the present site of the Hotel ZaZa / Gables Republic square project.
Let’s compare the same view from Fourth Street in 2013 and today — the scaffolding kinda gets in the way, but you get the idea:
The same view looking north from Fourth Street in 2013 and 2019, with the old Ginger Man bar and its restored facade incorporated into the ZaZa / Gables building. Images: Google Maps / James Rambin
The old facade, which will likely serve as an entrance to the new hotel or part of its ground-floor lobby bar, is a welcome addition to an already attractive project — especially in a district named for warehouses that’s slowly losing many of the properties granting it the architectural character that earned that name in the first place. We’re certainly no enemies of change, but this compromise seems like a pretty good one — and a relatively painless thing for the ZaZa folks to do, since it only adds to the building’s eclectic character.
A closer view of the old Ginger Man facade in the wall of the new building. The black bricks behind it are kind of funny — really makes the entrance pop, don’t they? Photo by James Rambin.
It may not placate fans of the Ginger Man, since the bar inside the building is likely going to be very, very different from the one they remember, but at least the old bar’s about to open a new location in the rapidly-growing Plaza Saltillo development. Plus, if you look at the old street views from the area before the ZaZa / Gables project kicked off, you’ll see it was mostly home to parking lots before construction kicked off, which doesn’t really do much for a vibrant downtown atmosphere.
A 2013 street view looking towards the northeastern corner of Guadalupe and Fourth Streets, a site now occupied by the Hotel ZaZa / Gables project.
What they’re doing here, called architectural facadism, has its fans and haters — that’s apparent in some of the slightly over-the-top reactions to the new tower imagined last week for the Royal Arch Masonic Lodge, which kind of does the same thing as the Ginger Man facade on a much larger scale. It’s admittedly hard to strike a balance between preservation and growth, but the ZaZa approach at least gives us something interesting to look at. You think the new bar will be any good?
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