When your Canadian girlfriend comes to visit Austin for the first time, and you live out in Pflugerville, you’re going to want to be closer to where the action is.
So you do some research and some finagling and get yourself booked into two different well-regarded Austin hotels, two nights in each one, for a long weekend in December.
The Thompson is in Downtown Austin, at 506 San Jacinto. It’s a bold boutique flex by Hyatt Hotels, it’s 32 stories tall, and there’s a swimming pool on the fourth floor, open to the sky; the topmost floors are residential.
The Loren is on Riverside, overlooking the south entrance of the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge that crosses what locals are pleased to call Lady Bird Lake. The Loren is also across from Zach Theatre on South Lamar, right? Yes – an unmatched location for any place wanting to present the best of this bustling, ever-busy river city.
So, for the first two nights – Friday and Saturday – Michelle and I would stay in the Thompson. And the two nights after that – Sunday and Monday – we’d be in the Loren.
I’d been given a brief tour of the Thompson when it first opened in January of 2022, and had been impressed by the soaring place’s elegant yet friendly vibe, the local art displayed on its walls, the way the hotel was divided into two separate entities: The Thompson, and (the more “adventurous”) Tommie.
The Loren I knew only from having enjoyed a guest chef dinner at lobby-adjacent Cafe at the Loren (where the latest Cafe Collaboration, with San Francisco’s Midnite Bagel, is still bringing the bready goodness), but I’d heard great things – from the Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker, no less – about their eighth-floor restaurant called Nido, and the whole edifice certainly looked fancy as all get out.
Let’s take a glimpse at how the weekend played out in these two examples of rentable hospitality.
I checked in early at the Thompson on Friday and was delighted by the professional yet Texas-friendly treatment at the front desk, the ease of navigating the long and beautifully appointed rectangle of a lobby, the lenticular photoprints of cactus flowers brightening the elevators’ interiors.
The room itself was a corner suite at the end of a long hallway on the 12th floor. Immaculate, of course – and impressive in a sort of neo Art Deco style, an aesthetic I’d happily noted during the years-ago tour, most dazzlingly evidenced by the sculptural design of the sideboard’s shiny gray front. The bed? Firm, yet gently giving, with smooth cool covers. And, beyond the curtains, a bird’s-eye view of Sixth Street and the rest of nearby Downtown. And of course there was the requisite bathroom, beyond the clever sliding door of which a prettily tiled shower was outfitted with lotions and washes from D.S. & Durga.
It felt like just the place for enjoying a weekend getaway from the workaday world, a place worthy of one’s beloved on her first visit to Austin. Michelle, ferried from Austin-Bergstrom International and ushered into the Thompson’s snazzy domicile by her adoring journalistic beau, quite agreed.
Wonderful.
And, dinner? At the hotel? Yes, even with so many fine dining options within easy walking distance, you’ll want to experience the Southern-inflected offerings of the Thompson’s Diner Bar – a restaurant, right off the lobby and also accessible directly from the street, that’s helmed by James Beard Award-winning chef Mashama Bailey. The meal Michelle and I had at Diner Bar was exceptional, from the deviled eggs with smoked fish and trout roe at the start to the bits of pork belly glistening among the noodles of Country Pasta at the end. The service, as in the rest of the hotel, was friendly and accommodating.
(Well, “friendly and accommodating,” except that the valet parking team was above and beyond even that, consistently, all the times we grabbed my Nissan to explore the city. And when your reporter had briefly panicked, unable to find his iPhone in the hotel room immediately after checking in, sure enough: There it was, on the backseat of his own damn car, retrieved by the valets who, with soothing words of encouragement, had gone instantly to check.)
We enjoyed our stay immensely over those two dates in the Thompson, availing ourselves of Sixth Street’s proximity for a walking tour of the surrounding blocks at night, venturing farther by car in the day to introduce Michelle to the unique charms of Austin’s Stuffed Animal Rescue Foundation and Toy Joy, to experience the brilliant way that Graham Reynolds Ruins the Holidays at the Long Center each year. And, always, that corner suite was a perfect place to crash after hours of happy gallivanting.
Sunday, and time to check out of the Thompson and switch to the Loren at Lady Bird Lake. But first, after a small bite of breakfast, a visit to another local attraction of similar name: The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on the far southern edge of town, a vast and lovingly landscaped swath of Texas prairie with nature trails and pathways, a museum and gift shop, classrooms and cafe, and a tall observation tower rising above it all for the perfect view.
It’s a fine thing, standing at the top of that limestone tower and looking out at the miles and miles of wilderness stretching away on all sides. The relative seclusion of a live-oak-surrounded clearing at one end of a wooded trail, though, is a much better place to propose marriage, I’ll suggest. And that’s precisely what I did that afternoon at the Wildflower Center, dropping to one knee in the dirt, clumsily digging a band of silver from my jacket’s inner pocket, and asking the lovely Michelle Wiwchar of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, if she would one day be my bride and share the rest of our lives’ mundane adventures together.
Reader, she said yes.
Any perceptions of reality following that are bound to be biased by feelings of extreme joy, granted, and tbh I’m still fairly reeling; but I’ll try to ring true regarding the Loren and its accommodations, for we checked in soon thereafter.
The place is grand, of a somewhat more sedate style of fanciness than the Thompson, but no less welcoming. It seems more vertical than the Thompson, somehow, though the Loren rises only eight stories into the big Texas sky; it seems – with its 108 luxury rooms, two penthouses, and adjacent residences – it seems a very citadel of opulence.
The room Michelle and I were given amplified the feeling of verticality, the ceiling soaring far above us and the suite’s posh furnishings, the entire north wall an enormous window revealed by remote-controlled shades and presenting a knockout view of Lady Bird Lake and the city beyond. The bed was a luxe mesa of comfort. The bathroom, an expansive, pristine palace all in white tile and counters, boasting both bath and shower, seemed designed to impress royalty – and certainly impressed this humble altweekly journo.
Moreso than the stylish and elegantly affable Thompson, everything about the Loren seems to whisper, “Money dwells here.”
Money eats there, too, and surely gets its worth: Nido, on the eighth floor, again with that marvelous view, is a restaurant you dream of dining in when your dreams are doing their best to make you feel like you hung the moon. The service is impeccable – especially when your waiter kind of resembles Jason Momoa and attends your table with the grace and gravitas of that actor’s Aquaman. And the culinary delights that chef Christen Grindrod conjures from local sources – the Murder Point oysters, the lamb ragu with cavatelli, those melt-in-your-mouth short ribs – are the equal of the Nido’s magnificent interior. That you can dine eight stories up, alongside Austin’s portion of the Lower Colorado River, and eat one of the finest white-linen meals you’ve known – that’s an experience made better only by looking into the deep umber eyes of your true love across the table.
Reader, I did. And never want to stop.
In the end, in the world of hotels, it always comes down to the valets and how to deal with one’s car, doesn’t it? The Loren’s team of drivers-and-parkers was excellent, as you’d expect, though they did have to contend with the one misstep of structural design the luxury site suffers: There’s a bit of a bottleneck at the drive-up entrance to the Loren, an oh-hell-why-is-this-so-narrow-is-it-supposed-to-be-one-way-only? moment that’s disconcerting if the hotel’s at all busy and someone’s exiting as you’re arriving. Still, it’s only a surprise the first time, and all works silksmooth as you leave, when the dapper valet, somehow bright and smiling at three in the morning, presents your car so you can drive your fiancée to the airport in time for her to check in through the TSA’s screenings and take a metal tube through the sky, across the 49th Parallel, all the way back to the urbanized part of the northern prairie she calls home.
And so, here’s this brief hospitality report for you, citizen, wrangled from deep in the heart of Texas, covering one long weekend akin to paradise: Two hotels of equally impressive but different vibes – each a splendid introduction to the wonders of Austin, Texas, no matter the reason for your visit.
~ Brenner
This article appears in January 26 • 2024.