Image: LV Collective / STG Design
Sabine Tower, a 39-story building planned at a former state pension fund headquarters near the corner of East 12th and Sabine Streets in downtown Austin, is one of several projects contributing to the city’s freshly-defined Innovation District — which seems mostly like a marketing effort to attract biotech industry tenants to buildings near the UT Dell Medical School and Central Health’s redevelopment of the former Brackenridge Hospital campus. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
But all that innovation eventually requires some places to sleep, so the plan for Sabine by local firm LV Collective is technically permitted as a 527-key hotel, though the developer prefers something heavier like “experiential living” or “flexible living” — a rental building providing short and long-term stays, potentially with furnished and unfurnished room options and an amenities package riding the line between what you’d expect from a hotel or a condo. (We’ve already spent several paragraphs figuring out how to describe this, so let’s not do it all over again.)
‘Experiential Living’ Tower Planned in Downtown Austin’s Innovation District
What’s important here is that the project and its looks from architects STG Design received a unanimous recommendation of compliance with the city’s Urban Design Guidelines from the Design Commission last week, providing a green light for the building to participate in the Downtown Density Bonus Program and rise to its full height of 404 feet, while paying a development bonus fee of $832,554 into the city’s affordable housing fund. While we don’t have any indication of when the building will break ground, it’s scheduled for completion in 2026, according to the developer.
Image: LV Collective / STG Design
Any forward motion on projects in the Innovation District is good news at the moment, considering the impact on planned developments here we’ve already seen from changing market conditions — in other words, RIP to the redevelopment of the HealthSouth site with hundreds of affordable apartments, at least for now.
Image: LV Collective / STG Design
These new renderings of the project and the site plan of its ground floor seen above provide a closer look at its activation of the surrounding streetscape, with landscape improvements to its pedestrian environment and two retail spaces at the lobby level. The large restaurant space at the corner of East 12th and Sabine Streets is a particularly appealing addition to the area, which despite the draw of the nearby Waterloo Park remains sort of a retail dead zone — the Symphony Square project’s retail space will hopefully address this as well. After all, what’s the point of an Innovation District if you can’t get a beer?
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