Kelly Wearstler took on the Austin Proper Hotel — her fourth collaboration with the Proper Hospitality group — with a brief that could easily have gone wrong: how do you make a tower in a rapidly developing downtown district feel rooted in a city whose identity is built on informality and the outdoors? Her answer, working within a purpose-built 32-story structure completed in 2019 with 244 rooms, was to let botanical Texas filter in at every scale. The facade's charred-timber and warm-wood vertical screening, planted with desert specimens — agave, yucca, sotol — gives the street-level entry the character of a curated landscape rather than a hotel threshold, e-bikes and a timber valet stand completing the casual register she was after. Inside, Wearstler layered her signature eclecticism with unusual restraint. Guestrooms pair grasscloth wall panels and tall botanical-print headboards in terracotta and gold with vintage-style Turkish rugs, cerused-oak furniture, and globe pendants that nod to mid-century Scandinavian lighting without reproducing it. The bar and lounge press floral de Gournay-style wallcoverings into wood-framed panels beside floor-to-ceiling glazing, skirted armchairs and barrel-back club seating arranged around marble-top café tables in a room that carries the warmth of a greenhouse. The rooftop pool deck, dressed in travertine and teak sun loungers with Canary Island date palms massed behind the pool edge, holds its own against the surrounding glass towers with something close to composure.

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