Tenaya Hills long had an “obsession with old architecture,” sparked by the Southern California house she grew up in. Dating back to 1926, it flaunted such Spanish Colonial Revival elements as a hand-carved fireplace surround, curved staircase, and vaulted ceilings. “I remember sitting there as a child thinking how pretty it all was,” she says.
She spent most family vacations with her seven siblings camping or holed up in motels, so by the time she was 19, she was ready for a different type of adventure. Hills headed to Provence for the summer to work at a small café with a few guestrooms upstairs. In France, “I first learned about the beauty of food, the curation of experience, and the importance of details,” she says. It was a formative chapter that, combined with her reverence for buildings, primed Hills for a career in hospitality design.
While pursuing a master’s degree in historic preservation at the University of Texas School of Architecture, Liz Lambert, the community-driven Austin hotelier behind Bunkhouse Group, spoke to one of her classes. Hills was so impressed that she called the company the next day and offered to work for free—not knowing that serendipitously an ad had been placed seeking a design assistant. Soon, Hills was at a construction site climbing a ladder on a sweltering day in a dress and flats next to her “tough Texas-born boss, melting but trying to play it cool.”
As design director at Bunkhouse Group, Hills has spent the last 11 years alongside Lambert thoughtfully developing and expanding its hotel portfolio—a collection of boutique properties that exude an aspirational level of cool and local authenticity—in Texas and beyond (thanks in part to a recent majority investment by Standard Hotels). Next up is the Hotel Magdalena, opening in December, which will be Austin’s newest addition, and the forthcoming St. Vincent, a revamp of a brick-clad former orphanage dating back to 1861, marking the brand’s New Orleans debut.
It’s a role that she relishes, and incorporates a lesson learned from a colleague when she was a photographer and photo editor at an alternative weekly newspaper, “a liberal bastion in a conservative place,” she says, prior to graduate school. “What you do or create doesn’t have to be right for everyone, and that is what being a leader is.”
