Every morning, we send you a free email packed with Austin news, business, and entertainment. Join 16,000+ readers who wake up to Austonia's newsletter.
Featured
austonia newsletter
Most viewed
The brainchild of 1-800-Contacts founder Jonathan Coon and Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts will soon come to fruition with plans for multimillion-dollar lakefront residences by Lake Austin.
Updates on the project, which was first proposed by Coon three years ago, came out Tuesday, confirming that Coon and his development team were partnering with Four Seasons to create The Four Seasons Private Residences Lake Austin. This is Four Season's first standalone residential development in the state, joining the ranks of current locations in London, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The development sits on 145 acres and will create 179 units that will range from smaller vacation homes just under 2,000-square feet to 7,000-square foot penthouses.
A sliding cable railway will take residents down the cliffside to boat docks on the lake. (DBOX for Austin Capital Partners)
The luxury homes will start at $4 million and will emphasize comfortability, beauty and privacy. In addition to units that soak in views from multiple directions, the development will include an indoor garden, an athletic center and spa, a private two-story restaurant, clubhouse and theater.
Half of the cliffside views will also turn into a public overlook above the lake and will include free parking, similar to a nearby Pennybacker Bridge overlook located just west of the property.
According to the Austin Business Journal, Coon said that developers will break ground in early 2023 and should be completed by the end of 2025.
In addition to Coon and Four Seasons developers, others working on the project include executive architects Handel Architects LL P and Page Southerland Page, Inc., project engineer Arup Group Ltd. and sales and marketing team Eric Moreland Group.
Coon said the homes will be made with care for a special reason—he and his wife will also be living on the property.
"Our goal is really to maximize the customer experience, probably because we plan on being customers," Coon told ABJ.
Enjoying Austonia? Signup for our newsletter to get daily Austin news, straight to your morning inbox!
- Whisper Valley is a sustainable old school neighborhoods - austonia ›
- 11 women on the cutting edge of Austin development - austonia ›
- Elon Musk will build a solar neighborhood in Austin, Texas - austonia ›
- Developing Camp Mabry could solve Austin's housing crisis - austonia ›
- River Park releases first plans for development - austonia ›
- East Austin development River Park gets new name and plan ... ›
- Condo development breaks ground at Austin's Graffiti Park - austonia ›
- Three new developments near Mueller set to transform over a block ... ›
- 5 mixed-use developments that will change Austin by 2030 - austonia ›
- Justin Bieber's manager sells Lake Austin mansion in bitcoin - austonia ›
- Austin has more million dollar homes than Dallas, Houston - austonia ›
Popular
(Pexels)
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.
