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Ross Sterling's 1926 Building Now Graces Downtown As Magnolia

By Lisa Gray,Houston Chronicle

The John Hardy Group provided the Project Management Services.

[Houston, TX]—It chafes my Houston pride to admire the Magnolia Hotel. The freshly renovated building is owned by a Denver-based chain and, worse, bears the name of a landmark Dallas skyscraper.

That said, the Magnolia also is steeped in Houston’s history. The downtown boutique hotel occupies the 1926 Post-Dispatch Building built by Ross Sterling at the corner of Texas and Fannin when he was merely an oilman, publisher and power broker, and not yet governor of Texas.

The building’s 22 stories made it one of the cities tallest skyscrapers. Its windows displayed the newspaper’s printing presses, and atop its roof stood the broadcast antenna for Sterling’s radio station, KPRC.

In Houston, a building with this kind of history isn’t merely a delight. It’s also rare.

Eventually, the Post-Dispatch Building, like most of Houston’s old downtown, fell on hard times. In the 60’s and 70’s, when corporate prestige demanded a glass-box skyscraper, potential tenants found the building’s limestone face and Corinthian pilasters hopelessly passé. In a desperate attempt to modernize, the building’s owner gave it a new, modern-looking front, stripping the first two floors of all their classical details. In their place went a flat brutalist façade with all the charm of a parking garage.

The uglified building sat vacant for years until, in the late 90’s, Denver hotelier Steve Holtze noticed its potential. Downtown revival had changed the Post-Dispatch Building’s neighborhood, once an urban no-man’s-land, to a location worth bragging about. At the corner of Texas and Fannin, directly across from Christ Church Cathedral, it’s within walking distance of the Rice Lofts, the Theater District and the county of federal courthouses.

Holtze’s corporate office estimates that between the building’s employees and the hotel’s guests, the Magnolia will bring 400 to 500 people a day into that area – many of whom will walk on downtown sidewalks, drink coffee at the café tables and otherwise add to the pleasant urban street life that Houston is still recovering. And this, perhaps, is the best thing about the Magnolia. It brings a dead spot back to life.

Holtze knows all about urban revivals. In Denver and Dallas, he transformed similar historical buildings into boutique hotels, becoming a major player in those cities downtown renaissance. (The Magnolia chain is named after Holtze’s Dallas hotel, the old Magnolia Petroleum Building, whose Pegasus sign is a Dallas icon.)

For the Houston Magnolia, Holtze retained Denver-based architect Guy Thornton who had overseen the renovation of the Magnolia in Dallas. In Houston, and the previous cities, the idea was for the hotel to look old on the outside, but turn-of-the-millennium new inside. Outside, the architect restored detail to the modernized façade so the building’s bottom now matched the ornate top. Notably, the new façade is a faithful re-creation of the original. Thornton moved the building’s main entrance from Fannin to Texas – from the sunny west to the shadier north. The British born architect says that during his first visit, “ I thought ‘Let’s have a little shade, shall we?’”

The entrance now faces the Christ Church Cathedral across Texas, rather than the boarded-up blight across Fannin. That urban eyesore is the Sterling Building of 1931, once a striking Art Deco office tower – also built by Ross Sterling, and also the victim of an unfortunate modern makeover. The empty Sterling Building serves a s a rebuke to anyone who this the Post-Dispatch Building was bound to be renovated sooner or later.

Inside, the Magnolia is as zoomy and up-to-date as the wireless Internet access that it offers business travelers. The rooms’ sleek furniture is custom built to accommodate the odd nooks created by the old building’s structural columns. On the second floor, there’s a library and a billiards room—smart semipublic places where a traveler can hang out – and a curving bar that seems destined to lure happy-hour drinkers from downtown offices. On the roof of the 22nd floor, and outdoor lap pool competes with an astounding view of eastern downtown.

But the hotel’s centerpiece is its drop-dead lobby. Curved walls, covered in leather cushions, form a round room with gaps opening to the concierge station and a giant, curvy fireplace. An atrium skylight is three floors above. A sinuous metal staircase glows dully in the light, looking more like a sculpture than a prosaic link between the second and third floors. It dominates the hotel’s public space – more dramatic than the prominent modern art or the attention-demanding furniture. Such swagger is fine, maybe even appropriate – Houston is, after all, a swaggering city, fixated on the present and the future, forgetful of the past.

There were some missed opportunities with the hotel’s interior. The Magnolia is a historical building, but the feeling inside is a strenuously modern. I wish more history were visible – say a chair or a few right angles that Ross Sterling would have recognized. That’s a quibble, though. The fact is, the Magnolia Hotel makes downtown a better place. And perhaps there’s a lesson in its provenance. It took a Denver company with a Dallas name to resurrect Houston’s Post-Dispatch Building. Sometimes it takes outsiders to make us appreciate our own city – to understand what it takes.