Once a Thirties motor inn, it’s been renovated in a sort of Texas-Zen style, with bare concrete exterior walls under red tile roofs and crushed granite walkways traversing a courtyard garden planted with native vegetation. The former motel rooms and bungalows have been redesigned in a stripped-down modern style, with queen beds, sparkling white bathrooms stocked with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, writing desks with Eames side chairs, and not much else.

The opening of a new Bunkhouse hotel, by the Austin-based hotelier Liz Lambert, is news around Texas, naturally, but it’s also news beyond the borders of the erstwhile Republic — there are people, to be frank, for whom San Antonio has just become an option, now that the Hotel Havana is open. Our point isn’t to talk Texas down; the fact that there’s a network of quality small hotels spreading south and west is a testament to the sophistication of the Lone Star State.

For a while now Austin has been one of the United States’ best-kept secrets: a little enclave of progressive thought, high-tech savvy, and hipster culture, cleverly hidden in Texas, which is not the first place you’d look — and it’s disguised as the state capital, no less. But until recently its hotel situation lagged a bit behind the times — one new and notable exception being the Hotel Saint Cecilia.

It’s an exaggeration to say Bunkhouse owns this corner of Austin, but with the opening of their fourth hotel in the neighborhood, it’s not far off — the Hotel Magdalena joins the Saint Cecilia, the San José, and the Austin Motel as part of a growing mini-empire along South Congress Avenue. Hotel Magdalena is the only one of the four that was designed from a blank page and built from the ground up, in a style that gently recalls the 1970s, when Willie Nelson owned this plot of land, and opened the Austin Opry House on this very site.

We’ve long sung the praises of American mid-century motels as raw material for modern boutique hotels, but the Phoenix Hotel has been at it for longer than we’ve been online. San Francisco’s original rock-and-roll hotel was a counterculture haunt in the ’80s and ’90s, and thanks to a courtyard with space to park a tour bus — and a neighborhood that was, shall we say, tolerant of a bit of revelry — it was the lodging of choice for rock stars from David Bowie to Nirvana.

Bunkhouse, the Austin-based hotel group responsible for most of the best hotels in Texas, has finally set its sights beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. Just how far beyond, however, might come as something of a surprise. Hotel San Cristóbal sets up shop in Todos Santos, on the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja California. This is a town that’s in the midst of making that familiar transition from fishing village to bohemian getaway to emerging tourist destination — and the San Cristóbal catches it at just the right time, as the first wave is beginning to crest.

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