A crash pad unlike any other
Quirky shipping-container hotel holds court in Round Top
There’s George Jones in a polyester leisure suit on the cover of his “I Am What I Am” LP, back when the country legend had a full head of dark hair and a yearning for forgiveness. The album is propped up on a counter not far from an old-fashioned Crosley record player in what surely is one of the quirkier hotel rooms in Texas.
Tucked behind a salvage yard and sharing space with a handful of roaming cattle, a series of six shipping containers awaits guests who aren’t looking for luxurious Italian marble tile or Johnny-on-the-spot room service.
Welcome to Round Top’s Flophouze Hotel.
Matt White, who for years has traded in antiques and architectural salvage through his Recycling the Past business, opened the hotel a couple of years ago in Fayette County. He started selling his wares in Round Top’s spring and fall antiques shows 19 years ago and eventually bought six acres and erected a big warehouse, where he keeps everything from a taxidermied giraffe mount to New Jersey kiln glass and salvage from the one-time home of the late heiress Doris Duke.
Creating a hotel from shipping containers was something he always wanted to do, and White figures that his interesting concept fits perfectly with life in a part of Texas so closely linked with antiques, decorative arts and history. As Texas Antiques Week shoppers search for treasures, many of which will find new life in a new home — and often for a completely new purpose — they’ll surely appreciate the reclaimed/recycled nature of the Flophouze.
Though White is proud of the luxurious bed linens and pillows, he notes that everything in each “houze” had a previous life. Furniture is gently used. Bathroom towel racks are metal egg crates mounted on walls. A small wet-bar counter in one unit is made from the floor of a bowling alley; the ceiling in another is covered in wood from an old whiskey distillery.
Elevated 4 feet off the ground, each container has a small deck with sliding doors that lead inside, where there’s a living area with a sofa, a wet bar, bathroom and bedroom. Pocket doors separate the public space from the private. Three units have queen-size beds, and three more have queen beds plus military-sized bunk beds.
You won’t find a TV here, but WiFi is easy to access and the units have air conditioning — even in Texas, where AC is everywhere, that’s the most commonly asked question about the Flophouze, says its marketing director, Kaylee Pace, a native of Magnolia.
White stocks each room with a variety of picks from his vinyl collection, and he said that as he rode out Hurricane Harvey he sat with his phone and bought 200 to 300 records online. Books are plentiful, too.
“We have the Round Top book, the Junk Gypsies book, ‘How to Shuck an Oyster’ and ‘Cabin Porn,’ which is really just a book on old log cabins,” White said. “I don’t know if anyone reads them. Ninety percent of the fun for me is buying them.”
During antiques-show seasons, rooms are $275$300 a night plus a $50 cleaning fee; off season, the rate is $175 a night plus the cleaning fee. Pace reports they still have a few nights open during the April show dates.
If the country setting doesn’t relax you, Round Top’s small-town vibe has been known to charm. One family arrived on a recent Friday evening only to find a local shopkeeper followed them a few minutes later. They’d bought a bag of locally roasted coffee but mistakenly left it on the counter. Through in-shop small talk, they’d mentioned that they were staying in the shipping-container hotel.
When one of White’s assistants walked up to their unit, lifting up the bag and asking if they’d left the coffee behind, they were flabbergasted. “Who does this?” they asked.
“That’s what happens in a small town,” White said with a big smile. “You come here and chill and unwind. Our tagline is ‘stay awesome.’ ”