There’s a new player in Austin’s ever-larger boutique hotel scene – Hotel Ella, which brings 47 luxury rooms to the downtown-adjacent area at Rio Grande and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
Open since late September, Hotel Ella join Austin’s rapidly growing list of boutique hotel offerings – including the new outpost of Kimber Modern, which is slated to open in the Rainey Street neighborhood and add around 30 rooms to the city’s hotel stock; Hotel Eleven, opening in 2014 with just 14 rooms; Hotel Zaza, which will bring 160 rooms to the downtown area in 2015; and Hotel Van Zandt, also opening on Rainey Street in in early 2015, with 322 rooms.
It also joins the ranks of Austin favorites like The Driskill, The Heywood Hotel, Hotel San Jose and Hotel St. Cecilia.
The new boutique and independent offerings provide an alternative to the huge number of larger-scale hotels that will be opening downtown in the next several years as part of the city’s hotel boom. There are currently several large chain hotels slated to open downtown in the next three years, including a 366-room Westin, the 1,031-room Fairmont, and the 1,012-room JW Marriott.
Hotel Ella previously housed an upscale hotel and restaurant called The Mansion at Judges’ Hill. The site was originally The Goodall Wooten House, a historic Classical Revival home built by local physician Goodall Wooten and his wife, Ella in 1900. The structure has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1975, and served as a student residence hall from 1953-1979.
