KTGY’s interior design studio is leading the renovation of Kimpton San Antonio, set for completion in 2024.
The firm is seeking to preserve and enhance the historic site while expressing the area’s vibrant and diverse culture through guestrooms, suites and public areas – which include a restaurant, multiple bars and lounges, meeting spaces, an outdoor courtyard and a rooftop pool deck.
The renovation process involves merging two buildings together – a modern, 300-room hotel connected to a 128-year-old German-English school as well as a stone-and-mortar structure that now houses eight hotel suites. The school is one of many crafted by the area’s German settlers, farmers enticed to move to the area after the Texas Revolution. Once they arrived, they converged with the city’s Mexican-American population, creating a new and lively culture that heavily influenced KTGY’s design choices.
Connecting the new Bauhaus-style building’s clean lines and contemporary elegance with the German school’s worn shapes and rustic simplicity was of great importance to the studio, with features like a breezeway containing a restaurant and bar physically connecting the two structures.
KTGY initially introduces guests to the property’s rich design story in the hotel lobby. The two front desks’ sculptural shapes reference classical Spanish pottery modernized through scale and structure, and a massive window wall behind allows guests to see through to the courtyard beyond.
On the opposite side of the front desk, the lobby bar and whiskey lounge pull from the architecture of the German school through the use of terracotta brick and tile. An oversized, contemporary woven art element meanwhile hangs from the ceiling and wraps around the bar.
Guestrooms and corridors are infused with Spanish-inspired design moments, like textured wallcoverings and layered case goods. Vertically-placed emerald green shower tiling, patterned stone nightstands and concrete floors add interest alongside ruched shades, luxe fabric headboards and closets lined in wallpaper.
