The hand towels hang on Jamey Garza's metal towel hook - a flat black rod sticking out at 45 degrees. Rules of geometry have never seemed so cured with touches of comfort and pampering. The design of the restored San Jose is like a new dialect - a collapse and combination of historic and cultural codes. In any given room, below the old poster from a Clifton Chenier gig at Antones, a complimentary bottle of Evian waits with two simple drinking glasses, inverted and touching slightly. Impulse says the whole thing is too clean to be funky or too funky to be clean, but somehow it is all of this at once.
Hybrid forms emerge when local flavor engages the canon of high taste.
It's a new wave of Texas cool, not unlike seeing Lyle Lovett wearing a cowboy hat and Armani suit. A shiny, blocky hotel designed by a team of Italian architects wouldn't have been so perfect. Tex Mex bungalows in a pueblo style have cut it. Soul doesn't exist in styles - it appears in things, times, and places. In objects and instances we feel that we've known before, and in the warm comfort of low-lying beds made from old furniture parts.