The Brewhouse of the Pearl Brewery complex, built in 1894 along the San Antonio River, was already one of the most architecturally distinctive industrial structures in Texas before Hotel Emma claimed it in 2015. Named for Emma Koehler, the widow who ran the brewery through Prohibition, the 146-room hotel was converted by architects Poteet Architects and decorated by Roman and Williams — the New York studio behind the Ace Hotel New York — who treated the original structure not as a shell to be softened but as the point of the whole enterprise. The concrete columns visible in the lobby photograph, patinated and massive, were left entirely as found; the wheel-form chandelier suspended between them, fitted with bare Edison bulbs, draws a direct line back to the building's mechanical past. Roman and Williams layered this industrial skeleton with a furniture sensibility drawn from Spanish Colonial Texas — ebonized four-poster beds with nailhead detailing, suzani-patterned accent cushions, woven leather stools, turned-wood side tables, and grasscloth wall panels that bring warmth without obscuring the raw limestone and brick visible in the brewery-wing rooms. The courtyard pool terrace, paved in terracotta tile and furnished with teak loungers under a steel-and-glass canopy, carries the same material logic outward. The whole compound sits at the northern edge of the River Walk, where Pearl's larger redevelopment — a farmers market, brewery tap, and culinary school — gives Emma a neighborhood rather than just an address.

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A historical hotel, authentic and welcoming, Hotel Emma was once a 19th-century Brewhouse.