Buford Tower, located in downtown Austin at 201 West Cesar Chavez Street. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Though it’s not the only mysterious tiny tower in Austin, the historic downtown structure known as Buford Tower is certainly our most visible, standing six floors at the intersection of West Cesar Chavez and Colorado Streets on the shores of Lady Bird Lake. Originally built in 1930 and used as a drill facility for the city’s fire department until its decommissioning in 1974, the building now serves as a bell tower, sounding out the hours plus Christmas carols in December with an automated chime system.
Despite its utility for telling the time, the tower itself is closed to the public, the interior not much more than a concrete shell compared with its lovely Italianate brick appearance outside. That doesn’t sit right with local designer Marcus Triest, who imagines the city-owned space with a finished interior working quite well as a single-unit boutique hotel, which could generate income for local affordable housing and homelessness initiatives. The unconventional use of urban spaces might as well be this site’s brand, so we’re naturally interested in the idea — let’s take a look:
Image: Marcus Triest / tinyarchitect.org
Triest’s conversion concept, as seen in the plans above and renderings below, would convert all six floors of the tower into one hotel room, and in this configuration it’s surprisingly spacious. His plan contains an entry level, kitchen, bathroom with extra sleeping space, living room with yet another bed, master bedroom, and a covered rooftop patio in the structure’s open-air crown.
Current estimates suggest Buford Tower costs the City of Austin around $2,500 – $5,000 a year in maintenance and restorations. By renting it out 240 nights a year with the suggested donation of $600/night the new Buford Tower can raise $100,000 a year for affordable housing projects.
The $150,000 – $200,000 needed for renovation would be raised through charitable auctions for future night’s stays and through corporate partners and their donations.
Images: Marcus Triest / tinyarchitect.org
Triest says he thinks that even if the city doesn’t care to open the tower to the public, the concept is a good “thought exercise” for evaluating how existing spaces in cities — spaces, he says, that we may not even notice — could be adapted or redesigned to increase their benefit to the communities around them, with revenue generation for housing as a pleasant silver lining in Buford Tower’s case. We’re sure plenty of Austinites would book a night in the tower if they knew the money was going straight to these causes, not to mention the bragging rights and Instagram photos you’d get out of the deal.
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Austin’s 17 percent Hotel Occupancy Tax already funds homelessness relief efforts in town, but converting interesting city-owned structures into unconventional rental properties for additional revenue generation — even temporarily — is a fun idea just the same. Our post-pandemic world is bound to be pretty weird, so why not lean in? Imagine an event or hotel space at the former Seaholm intake facility or long-neglected Norwood Estate and you start to get the picture — though we might be some of the only people who would enjoy a night in the Zilker Park fallout shelter.
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