Developer-builder friends transform seedy hotel into Heights staycation spot
The “color bomb wall” with a rainbow of colors and a giant, vintage-style mural with a UFO/ space/pretty girl theme has had passers by wondering what’s going on at a small hotel in the Heights.
Police used to stop here daily to arrest people, and firefighters from Houston Fire Station 15 drove past it regularly, too.
For years the hotel — formerly the Astro Inn — was a place most people didn’t want to go. It was old and dirty, a $35-a-night flophouse.
But others lived at the Astro Inn — some for years — and school buses stopped there, too, to pick up school-aged children. Though the rooms didn’t have kitchens, lodgers used hot plates and other electronics to cook simple meals.
Now, though, the people who pass at 100 W. Cavalcade smile and stop to check it out.
The Heights House Hotel — the name and everything else about the place has changed — is the city’s newest boutique hotel, officially open as the hospitality industry is starting to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.
In the fall of 2019, friends George Giannukos, a real estate investor and developer, and Jivar Foty and Jamal Kaileh, partners at Rise Construction, decided to start a passion project together.
Together they bought the Astro Inn and launched a yearlong, $3.5 million effort to gut the property and start over. Rise Construction handled the work, including design choices.
“There was so much we could do with it,” Giannukos said. “The Heights is an interesting part of town. You can drop into a lot of parts of town and not necessarily know where you are. You know when you’re in the Heights, and there’s not a hotel like this there.”
Heights House Hotel saw its first guests in October 2020 but was officially open in December. Its restaurant/bar, Space Cowboy, just off the main lobby, opened more recently.
General manager Marrissa Selby, who’d been furloughed from Hotel ZaZa before she was hired at Heights House, said the hotel is booked on weekends, a stay-cation escape for Houston-area residents who need a change of scenery but aren’t quite ready for fullfledged travel. Rates are $100$110 a night on weekdays and $110-$130 on weekends.
“I didn’t know exactly how it would look, but I knew there was potential to create a really cool place,” Kaileh said. “We just wanted a fun environment, a place where families could go have an outdoor experience.”
Since the hotel opened, the men have added a steel-frame pavilion where people can sit and relax — with or without food or drinks — but if you want that, you can get it at the Space Cowboy restaurant and bar, operated by Night Moves Hospitality. Even its menu sounds like a vacation: Huli Huli Chicken, ahi poke, Maui short ribs, a Boom Boom Burger or a rice-spam-kimchi concoction called Army Rice.
The swimming pool is open, too, with cabanas and wide umbrellas for those who want to be outdoors without baking in the sun. People who aren’t hotel guests can get day passes to the pool for $20 a person.
The dog-friendly hotel’s 133 rooms were all taken to the studs and redone for a more contemporary experience. The rooms either have two double beds or one king, and the furniture and room décor was purchased from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.
From West Cavalcade, the first things you see are the wall that Selby has dubbed “the color bomb” wall, where purple bleeds to pink, then shades of orange and yellow. A neon sign spreads the message: “Good Vibes Only.”
That L-shaped wall serves as a privacy barrier for those in the steel-framed pavilion, where tables and chairs and single-seat hammocks draw a crowd.
Guests and passersby stop for photos in front of the Instagram-worthy mural, too. A rainbow of colors is the backdrop for a vintage vixen, a space rocket, the moon and stars and, of course, a UFO.
Though the hotel’s exterior is mostly neutral, the trim works in orange; yellow and bright-blue doors also catch your attention. Blue and yellow shade umbrellas line the perimeter of the pool. Yellow and orange carry into the rooms, though in smaller doses amid a palette of neutrals.
The A-frame main building that houses the lobby/check-in desk as well as Space Cowboy, sports neon in playful signs such as “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe.”
Space Cowboy furniture comes in deeper tones such as cobalt blue and peacock blue and lush fabrics such as velvet on chairs and barstools.
Artists Sergio Aguilar and José Kontos were brought in from Monterrey, Mexico, to paint the murals, both inside and outside. The lobby mural used to be a different scene, and as Space Cowboy came together they knew it needed to be redone, Selby said.