Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1044932
70 H ouston's oldest continuously operating hotel — the city's only Theater District hotel property, and one with a pedigree — is back in business. The beloved Lancaster Hotel unveiled November 21, 1926, as the hotel that catered to the performers and patrons of the City Auditorium (hence its original name, the Auditorium Hotel). Now it has reopened after Hurricane Harvey took a toll. The Lancaster was purchased weeks before the storm blew in by the Shinn family of Magnolia Lodging (no relation to Chip and Joanna Gaines' empire); they're only the second owners, acquiring the property last July from a descendant of the original hotelier, Michele DeGeorge. Jay Shinn, along with two siblings and a nephew, Matthew Newton, make up Magnolia Lodging, and it's Jay, a Dallas artist, collector, and patron of the arts, who has curated the hotel's new art holdings, with many works from the personal collection he shares with partner Tim Hurst, as well as new acquisitions. Shinn himself is internationally exhibited with studios in Berlin, New York, and Dallas; his light-based work is in the permanent collections of three Texas airports (DFW, Hobby, and Bush Intercontinental), as well as the corporate collection of Tom Ford and the U.S. State Department. T he Shinns initially planned a light renovation of the hotel, but the hurricane changed that into a top-to-bottom renewal. With the intent to preserve the beautiful interiors but add important Texas art to the equation, Jay enlisted Dallas designer to the art set David Cadwallader of Cadwallader Design, THE LANCASTER, A STORIED THEATER DISTRICT HOTEL, GETS A MAKEOVER — AND A MAJOR COLLECTION OF TEXAS ART CURATED BY ONE OF ITS NEW OWNERS, DALLAS ARTIST JAY SHINN DONALD JUDD BY CATHERINE D. ANSPON whose clients include a celebrated Texas family with their own (sculpture) museum. Cadwallader's interiors for the Lancaster, informed by a subtle contemporary take on the original Joseph Finger Regency-style architecture, provide a serene, timeless setting. With an understated off-white and gray palette, graceful furnishings, and plentiful seating nooks, the reborn hotel feels intensely civilized with an intellectual and emotional component brought forth by the art. The first guests checked in October 15 and basked in a who's who of living Texas artists, as well as those with a Texas connection. The lobby impresses with paintings by bad boy Mark Flood and the lyrical Terrell James, a suite of four towering woodcuts by Donald Judd, and a panel by CAMH-exhibited Donald Moffett. On the walls of the new restaurant, Cultivated F+B, are works by Whitney Biennial talents Trenton Doyle Hancock and Amy Blakemore, along with a geometric illumination by Jay Shinn. A salon-style wall over the staircase highlights a swath of artists with Texas roots, including King Ranch heir Matt Kleberg's Matisse-like canvas that evokes a Roman wall niche; a Julie Speed etching of raucous sailors; MFAH Core Fellow David Aylsworth's deft abstraction; and Fort Worth artist Ed Blackburn's take on Gainsborough's Blue Boy. All 12 floors of the Lancaster boast art — at each elevator foyer and through all 93 rooms, including the hotel's posh suites, bringing the total number of works in the expanding collection to 330 (to date), documented in a Lancaster catalog. The quality and depth of the canvases, photographs, sculpture, and works on paper might just make the Lancaster Texas' best art hotel. thelancaster.com. The Lancaster Hotel's salon wall of Texas art Aaron Parazette's Solid, 2008, at the renewed Lancaster Hotel SLEEPING WITH