A developer of Austin hospitality spaces with rich local cultural histories and partners celebrated the start of construction on what promises to be a groundbreaking West Austin project Thursday, ceremonially turning dirt on Sixth & Blanco in Old West Austin.

Sixth & Blanco is the first mixed-use development by Larry McGuire of MML Hospitality, a partnership between Austin hospitality veterans McGuire, Tom Moorman, and Liz Lambert. McGuire is partnering with Riverside, also Austin-based, to redevelop the 1.6-acre property at the intersection of West Sixth and Blanco streets in the downtown-adjacent Clarksville neighborhood.

The first design by Pritzker-Prize-winning Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron to be built in Texas, Sixth & Blanco will have 10 three- to four-bedroom residences on its top two floors — nine two-story homes accessible via a circular staircase and one single-floor unit, each with a different layout and design.

The five-story complex will also have a 57-key, MML-operated luxury hotel called The Blanco, an amenity suite for both residents and hotel guests, a private members social club and bathhouse, and high-end retail, art galleries, and new restaurants.

“As we break ground, we couldn't be happier to bring the vision of Herzog & de Meuron and a collection of special businesses to our favorite neighborhood in Austin,” McGuire said. The Swiss firm is the design consultant on the project, while locally based company Page is the executive architect. Lambert McGuire Design is the interior design consultant.

Austin restaurants and shops along the stretch of West Sixth Street include Howards Bar & Club, Rosie’s Wine Bar, Clark’s Oyster Bar, Elle’s Boutique, Lora Reynolds Gallery, Align Pilates Studio, and new locations of Austin institutions Swedish Hill Bakery and ByGeorge, now MML brands. 

MML Hospitality and Riverside have closed a $193 million construction loan with Arvest Bank, with participation from Prosperity Bank and Southside Bank, to finance the project.

Sixth & Blanco has commitments for half the condominiums in the building, said MML’s McGuire in a Friday interview alongside Herzog & de Meuron’s Lukasz Szlachcic at the building’s sales office. The units average 4,600 square feet and cost from $11 million to $18 million. They’re scheduled to be delivered in the second quarter of 2027. 

A ‘locally fueled high street'

Sixth & Blanco is one of many mixed-use developments that have risen on Austin’s most traversed and popular streets in the past few decades, but it’s more thoughtfully incorporated and designed than many of them. This is partly because the street is the longtime home bastions of local, small-scale retail — some of which MML revamped as part of its specialized brand of restaurants, boutique hotels, and retail in Austin, Aspen, New Orleans, and Houston. 

It’s also part of the game plan for West Sixth Street, or at least the large swath of it between North Lamar Boulevard and MoPac. "The long-term vision is that this is a locally fueled high street for Austin,” McGuire said. "It’s already been happening organically,” with MML and a few heritage tenants already in place. Sixth and Blanco will add 20-25 commercial tenants to the mix, and its developers plan a similar project on another acre and a half between Harlan and Winflo streets.

A “high street” — a British term used to refer to a dense, pedestrian-oriented shopping and restaurant-heavy urban street — is something that Austin lacks, McGuire said, averring that some might consider South Congress Avenue to be leaning in that direction. McGuire sees an opporunity for West Sixth Street to retain a more local and small-scaled identity than that larger thoroughfare, in part due to the stamp he and MML are already putting on it, and in part because he and his partners will have an ongoing presence, with no plans to sell the properties they’re developing there. "We own enough [of West Sixth Street] and have a long-term goal. We’re not sellers,” he said. "I hope we’re going to be here for a really long time, bringing world-class design, hospitality, and other interesting tenants to the west side of downtown."

"Our investors, our development partners, view this is as a legacy project. And MML is all over this thing. We already have 5-7 operating businesses and will operate the hotel that’s the main tenant of the building,” he added.

For its part, the lower-profile Riverside has focused on central city projects with a street-level retail component as well. The Austin company’s recent developments include Fifth & West, 300 Colorado, and Centro in East Austin.

Mass timber and other considerations

Bringing world-class design to Austin — something it needs a lot more of — was one of McGuire’s goals in pursuing Herzog & de Meuron, and the company was interested in expanding to a new market in the Southwest U.S. and Austin in particular, said the firm’s Szlachcic.

It approached Sixth & Blanco as both a cultural and urban project, integrating existing street-front businesses, creating publicly accessible ground-floor courtyards and gardens, and making sure its sustainable design worked with the scale and tone of the neighborhood rather than maxing out the floor-to-area ratio and plopping down another glass box, which existing zoning entitlements would have for the most part allowed.

It’s also more environment-friendly than one of those glass boxes, built in large part with mass timber and incorporating energy- and resource-saving elements that are still uncommon in Austin. 

“We talked about sustainability from day one [of the project],” said Szlachcic. “The reduction in concrete itself [achieved by using mass timber] is a huge reduction in gray energy.” Solar PVs on the awnings on the front collect energy and reduce heat below, he said, and rainwater and condensate are harvested and reused.

There are also external shades on all the residences, which reduces solar heat and “brings a softness to the facade,” he said — a practice that’s a given in Europe but “revolutionary for a project of this size in the US. It’s something you don’t see on condominium projects here."

Legacy and longevity

Redeveloping several retail blocks of a historic and beloved Austin neighborhood into a “high street” doesn’t have to involve keeping residents amenable, but it did. "Sustainability for Herzog & de Meuron isn’t just environmental, it’s also economic, it’s social,” Szlachcic said. "This project is fully public on the lower levels. You could walk through any time of day, there’s no gate, there’s no doors, it’s an extremely democratic and public project. It becomes part of the city. In terms of social sustainability, it’s very important that there's also this return."

That sensibility informs the project as a whole, at least for McGuire, for whom it’s a first venture into the residential space. "Many of us [on the project] were born and raised here,” he said. "In terms of sustainability, we look at the longevity and what we’re adding, being the kind of developers and owners that hold a project long-term, steward [it], and bring quality like this."

"There’s an artistry to a firm like Herzog,” he added. "There is a public works component of all of this. Yes, we’re businesspeople and want a return, but we have a long-term approach to things. All the things that [Szlachcic] is talking about are not necessarily the most efficient things from a business standpoint, so the team has made a conscious decision to deliver a project like this that we feel like the city can be proud of, that the city can experience, even if they’re not buying a Chanel purse."