$300M Luxury Hotel Anchors Houston Tower Project

By Gail Kalinoski

The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston

Billionaire businessman Tilman Fertitta has opened The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston, a luxury hotel in a 38-story mixed-use tower that features a two-level Rolls Royce showroom, art from his own private collection, a 16,000-square-foot Grand Ballroom and a $3 million wine cellar.

Located at 1600 West Loop South in the Uptown/Galleria submarket, the hotel cost more than $300 million to develop and is part of a 10-acre mixed-use project featuring restaurants, retail, office and event space, including the Uptown/Galleria area’s largest ballroom and 35,000 square feet for conferences and meetings. The hotel has 250 guestrooms, each over 500 square feet, and VIP suites, including a 5,000-square-foot Presidential Suite with a wraparound terrace, a private elevator, a fitness room and a catering kitchen. The hotel tower includes the 1,500-square-foot Post Oak Suite and 22 residential apartment units with full kitchens, washers and dryers, and large walk-in closets that can be rented on a short- or long-term basis. 

“Houston has never had a property like this and I wanted to be the one to deliver. The Post Oak will stand up to the world’s best hotels. Guests will see the attention to detail we put in every touch point and the level of luxury they will not find anywhere else in Houston. It will certainly be a game changer,” Fertitta, owner of Landry’s Inc., Golden Nugget Casinos and the Houston Rockets, said in a prepared statement.

Fertitta said the luxury hotel is on track to receive the state’s first Forbes Five Star rating.

The master-planned project includes 11 stores of Class A office space. Houston-based Dancie Perugini Ware Public Relations is one of the first tenants, leasing about 12,500 square feet on the eighth floor, according to the Houston Business Journal.

Retail space will include 29° North, a boutique store, and The Salon at The Post Oak, both located in the hotel lobby. Post Oak Motor Cars features the Rolls Royce showroom in the hotel and an adjacent dealership for Bentleys and Bugattis available for purchase or lease.

The hotel has four restaurants and bars on the first floor including Bloom & Bee, H Bar and Craft F&B. Two premier restaurants, Mastro’s Steakhouse and Willie G’s Seafood, are located adjacent to the hotel property. They both have access to The Cellar at The Post Oak, featuring the hotel’s $3 million wine inventory.

Global design firm Gensler was the master design architect and Houston-based Tellepsen served as general contractor.

Houston’s hot hotel market

Houston is among the top five markets in the United States for hotel development this year, according to statistics from STR, the Hendersonville, Tenn., firm that tracks data for the global hotel industry. As of January, Houston had 87,509 existing hotel guestrooms and 4,999 under construction, placing it fifth in hotel guestroom construction behind New York City, Dallas, Las Vegas and Nashville, Tenn.

During the week of Feb. 25 through March 3, STR reported Houston’s hotel industry saw a double-digit increase in occupancy, up 11.8 percent year-over-year to 75 percent. The city’s hotels also had the third-largest jump in RevPAR among the top 25 U.S. hotel markets, rising $18.4 percent year-over-year to $218.81. Those numbers far outpaced the overall U.S. totals for the same period, which saw occupancy increase 1.7 percent to 65.9 percent and RevPAR rise 4.1 percent to $83.04.

Image courtesy of The Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston