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JW Marriott Houston Downtown

Houston, Texas, United States · JW Marriott · Core Luxury

JW Marriott Houston Downtown: ExteriorJW Marriott Houston Downtown: ExteriorJW Marriott Houston Downtown: Pet-Friendly Hotels in Houston | JW Marriott Hotel Downtown Houston

Houstonians nicknamed Samuel Fain Carter's 1910 tower Carter's Folly: sixteen floors of steel frame on swampy ground, the tallest building in Texas, every floor finished in Italian and Norwegian marble. A 1969 glass-and-marble slipcover hid it for four decades until an $80 million restoration, opened as JW Marriott on 19 November 2014, won the Driehaus Preservation Award the next year.

About JW Marriott Houston Downtown

History

The building that stands at 806 Main Street in downtown Houston was once called Carter's Folly — and the nickname tells you something important about the ambitions of the man who built it and the skepticism of the city that watched him try. Samuel Fain Carter, founder of Lumberman's Bank in Houston, commissioned the Fort Worth architectural firm of Sanguinet and Staats to design a sixteen-floor, steel-framed office tower at the corner of Main and Rusk Streets. When Carter announced the project in 1909, with an estimated cost of $650,000, many Houstonians doubted that a building so tall could be structurally sound on Houston's famously unstable, swampy ground. Others doubted a commercial building located so far from Houston's established business core would ever prosper.

The Carter Building opened in 1910 as the tallest building in the state of Texas and the first steel-frame skyscraper in Houston. Every floor was finished in Italian and Norwegian marble. Electric lights, fans, and cold-water drinking fountains were installed throughout — amenities that were extraordinary for the era. Carter placed his own Lumberman's Bank offices on the sixteenth floor, though he kept the bank itself at its original Main Street location. The building's marble interiors, at a period when Houston was still largely a low-rise commercial city of brick and wood, announced that the city's financial class had arrived.

In 1923 Lumberman's Bank changed its name to Second National Bank of Houston, and Carter sold the building to the institution he had founded. The bank commissioned a six-story addition from Boston architects Thomas M. James Company, with assistance from Sanguinet, Staats, Hedrick and Gottlieb. By the late 1920s the building had become a prestigious address in the heart of Houston's intensifying downtown development. John William Neal assumed the chairmanship of Second National Bank in 1929 and commissioned Hedrick and Gottlieb to design an elaborate second-floor boardroom that became one of the most distinguished interior spaces in the city's commercial architecture. South Coast Life Insurance acquired the building in 1955 as the bank gradually withdrew. In 1969, a subsequent owner made the regrettable decision to modernize the building by encasing the original facade in glass and Georgian-marble panels — a slipcover that obscured the original architecture for four decades.

The building's rescue came in October 2009, when Pearl Real Estate of Fort Worth purchased the property for $3 million. Pearl Hospitality hired Gensler to manage the restoration and transformation, with design architecture from Jordan Mozer and Associates. The project cost exceeded $80 million, supported by $7.35 million from the City of Houston and $12 million from the Downtown Redevelopment Authority. The restoration removed the 1969 slipcover, restored the original ornamental details that had deteriorated or been removed, replaced the aluminum window and door frames with original materials, and exposed the hot-riveted steel columns that had been hidden behind later finishes. The beautifully restored 1929 boardroom on the second floor became a unique event space. The JW Marriott Houston Downtown held its grand opening on November 19, 2014, winning the Driehaus Preservation Award the following year for a project that increased the building's value more than twelve-fold while returning Houston's first skyscraper to something close to its original dignity.

The setting

JW Marriott Houston Downtown occupies the Samuel F. Carter Building at 806 Main Street, Houston's first skyscraper, a 22-story Beaux-Arts landmark completed in 1910 by Mauran, Russell and Crowell when oil prosperity was reshaping the city's skyline. The Main Street corridor retains its historic commercial grandeur, and guests access Houston's six-mile underground tunnel network directly from the lobby. Discovery Green is 12 minutes on foot, the Downtown Aquarium 13 minutes, and Daikin Park 14 minutes away, placing the hotel at the crossroads of the city's cultural, sports, and convention core. The Metro Rail's Main Street alignment runs directly past the entrance, extending reach to the Texas Medical Center and NRG Stadium. 3 miles from Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

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