Hotel Magdalena

Hotel Magdalena opened in October 2020 on South Congress's Music Lane, built across four mass-timber buildings on the former site of Willie Nelson's Austin Opry House: itself built over a 1950s motor lodge with its own poolside live-music history. Bunkhouse's 89-room property leans on that lineage rather than inventing one, from the Summer House restaurant's name to its basement listening bar.

The place

1101 Music Lane, in Austin's South Congress (SoCo) district: a small hospitality-and-retail enclave built specifically around the hotel, on a site with its own musical history.

The concept

Hotel Magdalena is reported as the first mass-timber hotel in North America, its cross-laminated timber structure carried visibly from the corridors into guest rooms and porches across four separate buildings connected by open-air walkways beneath a live oak canopy: a deliberate low-carbon, faster-to-build alternative to concrete and steel. The site itself carries real history: it was previously home to the Terrace Motor Lodge, a 1950s motor court with a poolside restaurant and live music, later bought by Willie Nelson in the 1970s for his Austin Opry House music venue and musician housing. Hotel Magdalena's design and restaurant naming reference that lineage directly rather than inventing a backstory.

Dining & wellness

Summer House on Music Lane, led by executive chef Jeffrey Hundelt, serves wood-fired plates and takes its name from the mid-century poolside restaurant that once occupied the same site. A roughly 900-square-foot pool with a terracotta-and-terrazzo bar anchors the courtyard, and Equipment Room, a basement listening bar styled after Japanese jazz kissa bars, occupies a former literal equipment room.