Open for Business: Houston’s Newest Skyscraper is

In Houston, The 47-story Texas Tower, developed by the Hines and Ivanhoé Cambridge real estate firms, is now open in downtown Houston, the first such building for the city in almost three years.

Adding another skyscraper with a slanted top, the Texas Tower brightens the northern end of city’s downtown skyline with this gleaming contribution designed by the Pelli Clarke & Partners architecture firm.

An ordinary skyscraper, it is not. The Texas Tower has eight elevators where other buildings have six. It has park-like outdoor terraces on the twelfth level. It has stone imported from Italy and Turkey. It has an upscale health club, and soon-to-open street-level restaurants that invite passersby with the friendly warmth of landscaping and glass walls. And the Texas Tower is situated on the downtown block in a “just so” diagonal fashion to enhance the views from the building.

The new building stands amid a forest of Houston skyscrapers crafted by the late Gerald D. Hines, a legendary developer and the global development company he founded. The handiwork of Hines: the Texas Tower is across the street from the 75-story JPMorgan Chase Tower, and a couple of blocks from the architectural breakthrough Pennzoil Place, the 609 Main at Texas, and the highly recognizable red-granite edifice that was originally named RepublicBank Center and a number of other tall Hines office buildings and apartment towers in downtown Houston, the place where Mr. Hines assembled his first skyscraper, One Shell Plaza, over 50 years ago.

“Texas Tower is emblematic of the values which my father, Gerald Hines, instilled in all of us at Hines and will forever represent the legacy he left behind of pairing best-in-class design and engineering with innovative, sustainable and functional spaces to create remarkable buildings and to continually be raising the bar,” said Jeffrey Hines, Chairman and CEO. “We are so proud to continue his legacy and introduce this next generation workspace to the city of Houston and welcome our Houston workforce into our new headquarters next year.”

Hines, which has developed hundreds of towers around the world, will move its global headquarters into the Texas Tower, where it signed a 15-year lease for 180,000 SF covering five floors.

The Texas Tower opens with roughly 45 percent of its 1.2 million SF leased. Cushman & Wakefield represents the property, which has been luring tenants from older building even while the Houston office market has been sluggish due to retrenchment in the energy industry and tenant downsizing in the Covid era. Downtown vacancy is around 25 percent.