Two separate, completely unrelated proposals for hotel projects located virtually across East Seventh Street from each other are in review with the City of Austin, believe it or not — and while one of these East Austin plans is a lot larger than the other, we believe the foundation of comedy is when there’s a big guy and a little guy, so let’s take a look at this odd couple and see what’s set to break ground:

1612 East Seventh Street

A five-story boutique hotel with 132 rooms is planned on a roughly half-acre collection of adjacent properties assembled by local investor John Hernandez at the northwest corner of East Seventh and Concho Streets, according to permit activity dating back to 2021 and a site plan filed last month.

The plan, which contains addresses from 1604 to 1612 East Seventh Street, would rise to a maximum height of 60 feet thanks to its location just inside the northern boundary of the Plaza Saltillo transit-oriented development zone. Many details of the building’s design are unclear at the moment, along with the identity of the developer or hotel itself, but the project’s representatives at land use firm Drenner Group have indicated the building will include some form of street-level retail, along with approximately 89 underground parking spaces.

1603 East Seventh Street

This much smaller proposal for a hotel atop a 0.15-acre tract at 1603 East Seventh Street actually showed up all the way back in 2020, which was sort of a historically bad time to build a hotel — but with only five rooms, there’s perhaps less risk involved, with the project really seeming more like a short-term rental property permitted as a hotel rather than a full-blown hospitality operation. Although it’s been three years since the plan’s appearance, we believe with the number of permits filed for the project in just the last month that a groundbreaking could be imminent.

Since the site plan for the project has already been approved by the city, we’ve got a bit more information on this plan, associated with local investors Jason Martin and Louis Ellman. Despite only containing five rooms, the hotel rises four floors on its site, its 50-foot height allowed under the same Saltillo TOD rules as the project next door. You’ll note we weren’t messing around when we said these two plans are situated virtually across the street from each other: 

To make things even more complicated, the two hotels share similar titles in the city’s permit system, the small one called the “7th Street Hotel” and the bigger one known as the “East Austin 7th Street Hotel.” Their final names had better be as distinct from each other as possible, so potential guests don’t park in the wrong driveway.