Designed as a garden hotel on a four-and-a-half-acre site with varied and lush outdoor landscaping spread among terraces and fountains, pergolas, and a swimming pool, the hotel rises to six stories around the central elevator shaft flanked by five-story wings. The stuccoed precast-concrete walls are similar in finishing treatment to the restored nineteenth-century buildings in nearby La Villita (
SA38). A standing-seam metal roof with a shallow, slight pitch covers the verandas of the guest rooms. During the mid-1960s, urban renewal in this section of the city made this large site available. Fortunately, three small 1850s houses and the German-English School (1859–1875) survive and have been kept as an integral part of the complex.