Downtown Dallas skyscraper’s groundbreaking project welcomes guests to top-floor hotel

By Editor On Aug 7, 2021

High above the traffic on Elm Street and above the heads of busy office workers, guests check into an exclusive hotel in Dallas.

The innovative accommodations called The Guild are located on the top two floors of the Santander Tower in the city center.

Skyscrapers that once housed corporate offices have been converted into 64 luxurious hotel rooms. It’s a groundbreaking project from Austin-based The Guild Hotels.

“This is the first office remodeling we’ve done,” said co-founder Brian Carrico. “We usually work in apartment buildings.

“We are currently examining an office conversion in Miami Beach and are talking to clients everywhere.”

The concept attracts the attention of office building owners who have excess space to fill.

Opened in 1982, the Santander Tower – until recently called the Thanksgiving Tower – was originally the headquarters of the Hunt family’s oil and gas business.

The boardrooms on the 49th and 50th floors were empty when Guild Hotels began looking at the building, which is owned by Woods Capital. “We started talking to the owners back in 2018,” said Carrico. “You accepted the idea of building the hotel.

“Woods Capital had this vision for the building with many different uses and wanted to implement it.”

The 1.4 million square meter office tower is around 70% let.

“These old office buildings often struggle to find tenants, even in a hot market,” said Carrico. “These buildings from the 70s and 80s are ripe for this type of renovation.”

Guild Hotels and Woods Capital gutted the upper two floors and converted the upper floors into hotel rooms and common areas for guests.

“We got it down to the concrete,” said Carrico. “It took 10 months, from start to finish.

“Plumbing was by far the biggest logistical thing we had to deal with.”

The new accommodations range from studio rooms to large one and two bedroom suites. Each room has a small kitchen area and a large bathroom.

And each suite has a washer and dryer.

“Our average length of stay is over seven nights,” said Carrico. “We get a lot of people who stay with us for a longer period of time.”

The hotel group’s biggest customers are business travelers who travel a lot.

The guild operates in Dallas, Miami and Cincinnati and is looking to expand.

The Dallas location quietly opened and built a following during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Guests use an app on their mobile phone to gain access to the building and the hotel rooms. “Our business model prepared us for COVID before we saw COVID with contactless check-in and everything arranged over the phone app,” said Deputy General Manager Matthew Holmes.

Holmes said the Dallas location attracted more than just the usual business travelers. “We had people building houses and traveling doctors and nurses,” he said.

In addition to the Santander Tower location, The Guild has a 28-room hotel in the Katy Apartment Tower in Victory Park.

Room rates at the Santander Tower average around $ 179 per night.

Guild co-founder Brian Carrico in one of the rooms in the Santander Tower in downtown Dallas. (Jason Janik / special article)(Jason Janik / special article)

“We’re considering expanding in Dallas,” said Carrico. “It is one of the fastest rebounding hospitality markets in the country.

“We’re looking for locations in Bishop Arts and Turtle Creek.”

Hotel guests in the Santander Tower have access to two private rooms – a co-working area with a conference room and a lounge with a kitchen, meeting rooms and large-screen TVs.

Guild guests also have access to the private Tower Club, located on the 48th floor of the Santander Tower, which features a restaurant, bar and meeting room.

“It’s wonderful for the guests and synergistic with the Tower Club,” said Carrico. “Especially now that the COVID is subsiding, they are hosting a number of events and we are doing business with them.”

Carrico said other building owners became aware of the Dallas project and would be looking at the new hotel complex.

“The conversion of the guild made a lot of sense to us, especially because of the ability to combine it with the Tower Club,” said Billy Prewitt of Woods Capital. “I think it would be a good option for other office towers that have similar free equipment that The Guild can use.”