Hospitality

It takes treating the building as the brand asset. The Cabana hosted the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Led Zeppelin in its first life — that history was not a marketing line, it was a constraint on what could be touched. We worked the conversion around load-bearing columns between every original hotel room (2 rooms became a 1BR, 3 rooms became a 2BR), kept the brise-soleil facade intact, and surgically demolished interior beams while preserving the brick course that gives the building its silhouette from the street.

You staff for it. Carlos has spoken about the National — the largest adaptive reuse in Texas at the time, 1 million SF across 52 floors — where the historical commission would not allow replacing the existing glass with modern glass, which meant the entire building’s construction logistics had to run through a single original freight elevator. The schedule held because the team designed around the constraint: staggered start/leave, bathrooms every other floor, ten- to twelve-hour shifts, food allowed on-floor during COVID. Hospitality projects on historic buildings require that same constraint-first mindset from day one.

That is the work. Hotel back-of-house — kitchens, laundry, loading, MEP risers — is usually where hospitality schedules slip, because the public-facing finishes get the attention. On Cabana’s back-of-house conversion to two-story apartments, we removed the existing bar joists, surgically demolished beams without losing the facade, and ran new load-bearing metal stud walls all the way down to basement to support the new load through Level 2 and the roof. Hospitality back-of-house gets the same level of attention as the lobby.

Variety in a single building. A hotel has commercial kitchens, public assembly, guest rooms, BOH offices, mechanical rooms, sometimes ballroom or pool, sometimes retail at-grade — and every one of those programs has its own code path, its own trade stack, and its own QC posture. Carlos has described Cabana as challenging in part because of the "variety of construction types in one building." That is the hospitality default state.

You build the QC scaffolding before you frame the first wall. Brian Wildman is running 46 high-end custom condos at Knox Street to a 1/16th-inch finish spec, and that work was important enough to bring on a dedicated finish verification coordinator — embedded on the condo floors full-time, walking each unit with the approved submittal package and the buyer’s spec sheet side by side. Hospitality-condo programs need that kind of structural QC investment, or the schedule eats itself in rework.

By starting earlier than the contract requires. Carlos walked through the National before construction began — helping inventory historical items for NPS and TXC — because the brand-standard work and the preservation work needed to be reconciled before crews showed up. Brand standards on hospitality projects are not a finish item. They are a schedule input.