Lake|Flato Architects

LAKE | FLATO ARCHI TECTS genuinely celebrates the wood. It also lets you circulate around those heritage trees that were saved.” Razzaque happily reports that those trees were able to “survive and thrive” past construction. “I’m glad we could celebrate them,” she says. “Having a mature landscape creates so many opportunities to make the site feel like it’s been there for a long time.” Operated by Austin’s acclaimed Bunkhouse Group, the Hotel Magdalena is the first mass timber boutique hotel in North America. It includes a ground floor restaurant, swimming pool, outdoor pool bar, and event space that all integrate into the central courtyard terraces. According to Razzaque, “The initial design thinking was to embrace the site and the landscape, and create an oasis in a more urban environment. Bringing in mass timber allowed that design intent to fold into the story of the project. That wood experience and that Oak trees on the site, which became the focal points for outdoor gathering spaces and private suite gardens. All rainwater on the property is collected in underground cisterns and is used to meet the irrigation demands for the landscape, which emulates the spring-fed rivers in the Texas Hill Country surrounding Austin. “It’s an 89-key hotel and it opened October of last year, during the pandemic,” Razzaque shares. “We kind of joked that if we’d started thinking about designing the hotel 10 years ago, knowing it would have its grand opening during COVID, we still wouldn’t have changed a thing design- wise. Basically, all the major moves work really well in a pandemic context. We have all exterior circulation which, for a boutique hotel, is kind of a paradigm shift. It was thoughtfully done and there’s a lot of depth to it. It’s styled like porches with seating areas, with great spaces to plunk down in a rocking chair overlooking the courtyard. There’s also a bridge connecting two of the buildings that’s really beautiful. It Magdalena Hotel Courtesy of Casey Dunn