When cattle baron Colonel Jesse Driskill commissioned a hotel on Sixth Street in 1886, he intended it as a monument to Texas prosperity — a Romanesque Revival confection in warm brick and cream limestone, with his own likeness carved into the facade alongside longhorn busts, as if the building itself were a trophy. That ambition survives intact. The Driskill remains the oldest operating hotel in Austin, its four-story facade presenting the same horseshoe arches and ornate stonework to Congress Avenue that it did when Lyndon Johnson held court here on election nights. The lobby, preserved through successive renovations, delivers on the exterior's promise: a forest of fluted columns topped in green and gilt, a monumental staircase ascending toward a portrait of the Colonel himself, and overhead, a Tiffany-style stained-glass dome in amber and cobalt that functions less as decoration than as declaration. The 189 rooms balance the building's Victorian bones against a lighter contemporary sensibility — tall coved ceilings and arched window surrounds kept in crisp white, furnished with iron-framed beds, tufted leather benches in oxblood, and campaign-style trunks with leather hardware that nod to the frontier without costuming themselves in it. The balcony suites open directly onto the building's second-floor arcade, wrought-iron chairs facing the downtown skyline. Down in the restaurant, lacquered green paneling and pressed copper ceilings sit alongside penny-tile floors and bobbin-turned chairs, the room carrying the atmosphere of a Gilded Age dining room that has never quite decided it needs updating — which, here, is precisely the point.

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