Doubling down on luxury
AC Hotel and the C. Baldwin stand out — from modern designs to signature scents
Slabs of gray and white veiny Italian Carrara marble from decades ago still line the walls of the lobby at 723 Rusk, the city’s newest hotel — the AC Hotel by Marriott Downtown Houston — and a site with a fair amount of history.
Once a 10-story office tower filled with bankers, lawyers and oil barons, the building at the corner of Rusk and Main is starting the newest chapter of its more than 100-year-old life with European hospitality.
Spanish hotelier Antonio Catalan, founder of AC Hotels, worked with Marriott to bring the brand to North America, and the downtown Houston location is its third in Texas. (AC Hotels by Marriott is a subsidiary of Marriott International.)
Like others that have opened in the past few years, AC Hotel was created with both a story and a sense of place so that a visitor’s stay will be an experience — not just another night of sleep. AC Hotel is distinctly modern with midcentury touches that pay tribute to the building’s designation on the National Register of Historic Places — an honor that reflects its 1960s, post-World War II modernization rather than its 1913-1915 origin.
It could be said that Marriott made everyone stand up and take notice when its Marriott Marquis opened with its eye-popping Texas-shaped lazy river pool on an outdoor terrace near Discovery Green. It opened just in time for the 2017 Super Bowl, and other distinctive hotels opened later: The George and Cavalry Court in College Station in 2016, the glamorous Hotel Alessandra in the fall of 2017, and Tilman Fertitta’s luxurious $350 million Post Oak Hotel in early 2018. Months later, both the Omni Hotel in Tanglewood and The Lancaster downtown reopened with brand-new looks after being swamped by Hurricane Harvey.
Expected to open in early September is C. Baldwin — a rebranded DoubleTree by Hilton Houston Downtown — a nod to Charlotte Baldwin Allen, the wife of one of Houston’s founders, Augustus Chapman Allen. Most here grow up knowing about the Allen brothers’ founding of the city on Buffalo Bayou in 1836, but now Charlotte, whose inheritance helped bankroll her husband’s and brother-in-law’s land deal, gets her due.
What they all have in common is that their owners decided that their inns would be different.
Though Houston’s AC Hotel is part of the Marriott chain, the AC chain in Europe was founded by Catalan and shows his Spanish/ modern influence. That means Italian millwork and marble and a lobby/café/kitchen filled with modern furnishings in creams and taupes. In guest rooms, beds on platforms look like they’re floating, and benches and other features are wall-mounted, rather than traditional-style dressers or other furniture.
Sustainability was factored in, so guest room lights are motion sensitive; sit still too long and you’re likely to find yourself in the dark. There won’t be travelsize bath products to take home; stationary dispensers in the showers offer Greek apothecary KORRES products. They’re nice, but you won’t be taking them home with you.
If it sounds a little too chi-chi that a hotel has a signature scent you can detect as soon as you enter, get used to it. The George’s signature scent — a soft masculine scent that reminds you of nice leather — can be purchased in candle form. The AC Hotel’s scent is a little more complex, with five highlights: cut grass and root, fig leaf and stem, gum resins, amber elements and fir balsam.
For C. Baldwin, a femaleforward team, which includes the much-lauded Rottet Studio, designed guest rooms and public spaces, and Kate Rohrer’s ROHE Creative worked on the food and beverage interiors.
On a recent visit to Houston, Rohrer said she is designing the main lobby bar to be a popular happy hour spot with a midcentury vibe, and a smaller “speakeasy” bar will be a ladies lounge. If you’re used to hearing about “gentlemen’s clubs,” the only men who can come to this bar will be those escorted by a woman.
“It’s about creating a place where women are comfortable, so we are going with a vision of an old parlor,” said Rohrer, who loves vintage and antique finds. “We’re using crystal and warm metals and things that will make the room glow, much like a woman’s jewelry or accessories. To bring it into today’s modern world, we’ll layer bold, modern art pieces on top of that.”
That means traditional mouldings, antique mirrors, bold velvet with fringe and tassels, and little bits of bling here and there. Old, salvaged marble fireplaces will add a cozy living room vibe to the small lounge, which will be the last component of C. Baldwin to open.
Rohrer’s jewel box of a bar will be small, with just 1,500 square feet, but she hopes the concept helps “tell the story of a woman.”
“My staff is all women, so we thought, ‘What do I want to feel like when I’m sitting at the bar?’ ” she said rhetorically. “I want to feel at ease. I can eat what I want to eat and drink what I want to drink and talk about whatever I want to talk about with my friends or colleagues.” “The tone will be mod, neutral colors with sensuous curves,” Rohrer said of the restaurant and bars in general. “We’re trying to bring back a little fun and funk on top of the mod.”
At AC Hotel, which had its soft opening last week with about 30 percent occupancy, the design influence is modern European, said Cathalin Leija, director of sales and marketing.
The lobby, which flows from the understated check-in desk to a lobby bar and on to a small kitchen where breakfast is served, is filled with taupe and cream modern-style furnishings, some in small groups of tables with chairs or banquettes and some in more living room-style groupings.
There’s the Zoe Ballroom, a space that in the building’s earliest days was the Zoe Theater, where Houstonians saw silent movies. The vaulted ceiling is still there, but big crystal chandeliers hang overhead, waiting for cocktail parties and small wedding groups.
AC Hotel sits where there once were two office towers — both launched by the late Jesse Jones, who for years also owned the Houston Chronicle — and the movie theater had its own firstfloor space. Like many buildings from the early 20th century, it got a major update in the mid-1960s, and when developers wanted to reinvent the space, they were advised to capitalize on the midcentury updates, an architectural style called “New Formalism” and part of the broader modernist movement of the time.
On floors with guest rooms, you’ll occasionally see a mahogany door without a guest room number. Those are holdovers from the building’s office-tower days; they may have doorknobs, but they don’t open to anything.
Guest rooms have beds on smaller platforms to feel like they’re floating, and desks or tables on thin legs or cantilevered for a decidedly modern style. Closets have the open style you see in newly opened hotels, and the bathrooms are covered in luxurious tile or marble, all in taupes and creams.
Leija said that some things were done for sustainability, such as installing motion sensitive lighting and bath product dispensers in showers instead of throw-away travel-size plastic bottles. In the bar, your drink will come with a paper straw — not plastic swizzle sticks.