Written By | Fashion and Design Desk
KPF's 74-storey mixed-use supertall brings a hotel, offices and luxury apartments to the banks of Waller Creek.
Search
AUSTIN
Austin has long marketed itself on being a little weird. Now it has a skyline to match. Dezeen reported on October 28, 2026 that KPF has completed Waterline, the 74-storey tower that is now the tallest building in Texas.
Published figures for the height vary slightly by source. CRE Daily puts it at 1,025 feet, which it describes as 23 feet taller than Houston's JPMorgan Chase Tower; KPF's 2022 reveal cited 1,022 feet, and Wikipedia lists 1,034 feet to the roof. By any measure, Waterline clears Houston's long-reigning record holder.
A Vertical Neighborhood
The tower's concept was set out when KPF revealed it in 2022: a stack of uses meant to behave like a small district. Dezeen's early coverage described a ground-level pavilion with roughly 24,000 square feet of public retail and restaurants, a 13-storey 1 Hotel Austin with a rooftop pool, offices on the next 27 floors and residences on the top 33. KPF itself calls the building a "vertical neighborhood," and its facades use a collage of patterns to express the different functions inside.
CRE Daily's September 2026 report fills in the numbers: 352 apartments, called the Bosque Residences, ranging from 701 to 2,803 square feet; 703,000 square feet of office space; and a 252-key hotel. Amenities include coworking and conference spaces, a podcast studio, a golf simulator, a poker room and multiple pools. Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential developed the project, DPR Construction led construction, and HKS served as architect of record.
Lifted Above the Creek
The design's most distinctive gesture happens at street level. According to KPF, the base is lifted 30 feet on sculptural columns, forming a two-storey canopy over a public "paseo" that links the building to the waterfront. Dezeen noted that the raised base sits above a preserved floodplain, a practical move for a site on Waller Creek.
KPF's Andrew Klare said the columns draw inspiration from "sacred species of trees in Austin." The tower itself stacks and twists to follow the curve of the creek and finishes in a sweeping crown. KPF president and design principal James von Klemperer said at the time that the project "promises to become an icon for Texas' capital city, expressing its spirit of quirky innovation." The team has targeted LEED Gold certification.
Timeline and Money
Waterline moved quickly. Construction began in 2022, the tower topped out in August 2025, and construction was finished in late August 2026. CRE Daily reports the team finished two months ahead of schedule.
The project was financed with a $742.5 million self-financed construction loan, originated in June 2022 and maturing in June 2027, according to the same report. The timing matters, because the market it is entering is cooling.
Why the Shape Matters
Supertall towers often earn criticism for being indifferent to their surroundings. Waterline's designers have tried to answer that charge in three ways. First, the twisting, stacked massing follows the curve of Waller Creek rather than ignoring it. Second, the lifted base keeps the ground plane open and leaves the floodplain intact. Third, the facade patterns are meant to show the building's mix of uses from the outside, so that a passerby can read office, hotel and home as different parts of one structure.
Whether those ideas fully succeed is a matter for the city to judge over years of use. But they reflect a wider shift in tall-building design, away from isolated icons and toward structures that try to behave like pieces of a neighborhood. Seth Johnston of Lincoln Property Company framed the project at the time as a milestone for downtown "not only because of its height," which is the right instinct: a record is only a headline, whereas a good ground floor is a daily experience.
Dezeen's headline described the project as the completion of Texas's tallest skyscraper, and the sheer scale of the achievement should not be undersold. Building 74 storeys on a creekside site, with a hotel, offices and homes stacked in one structure and a design team that spans KPF, HKS and DPR Construction, is a logistical feat as much as an aesthetic one.
The Market Question
CRE Daily cites Yardi Matrix data showing Austin apartment inventory grew 5.4 percent over the trailing 12 months through July, while rents fell 3.7 percent year over year. Nearby towers such as The Travis, at 50 stories and 414 units, and Paseo, at 48 stories and 550 units, add to the competition. The publication's judgment is that Waterline's biggest challenge may not be reaching new heights but standing out.
That tension is worth sitting with. Supertalls are born of long-horizon optimism, and they arrive on someone else's schedule. Whether Waterline becomes the symbol of Austin's maturation or a case study in cyclical timing will depend on how well its mix of uses, particularly the public ground plane, holds the city's attention.
What This Means for You
For Austin residents and visitors, the most immediate benefit is the public realm. The paseo and the ground-floor food and beverage offerings are meant to be open to everyone, not just tenants and hotel guests. If you are in town, walk the creek-side path and judge the base of the building, which is where a tower earns its place in a city.
For anyone watching design trends, Waterline is a useful snapshot of how supertalls are changing. The old model was a glass obelisk on a plaza. The newer model blends uses, borrows from local ecology and tries to give something back at street level.
For renters and investors, the lesson is more cautionary: a landmark address does not insulate a project from supply and rent trends.
The Skyline Verdict
Texas has no shortage of towering ambition, but a state famous for bigness now has a symbol that is also distinctly local. Whether you find a twisting, columned supertall charming or showy, it is hard to deny that it gives Austin's skyline a point of view.
The building is complete, the records are broken, and the harder question begins: what will the city do with its new tallest neighbor?
