This Towering Texas Hotel Was Left for Dead, Until a Hometown Kid Spent $30 Million Bringing It Back

Give me an old hotel with a story over a shiny new one any day of the week. The kind with a lobby that makes you stop mid-step and a sign out front that has been glowing since before your grandparents were born.

New hotels give you a keycard and a coffee pod. Old ones give you a place you actually remember.

Which is why I keep thinking about a fifteen-story tower that rises out of the flat West Texas prairie like it wandered in from a bigger city and decided to stay. It is all polished terrazzo and neon, and it has zero interest in pretending to be modern.

That is not a flaw. That is the entire point. Here’s the story of a landmark that oil money built, that decades nearly erased, and that one hometown kid refused to let go.

A Skyscraper on the Prairie

You see it long before you reach it. Driving into Big Spring, the town’s tallest building climbs straight up out of the mesquite and mesas, all Art Deco lines and red rooftop letters. For years it was billed as the tallest structure between Fort Worth and El Paso.

That is a genuine skyscraper in a town of fewer than thirty thousand people. Step through the doors and the past reaches right back for you.

The lobby floor is original terrazzo, cool and glossy underfoot. A double marble staircase splits and rises to an iron-railed mezzanine. Crystal chandeliers throw light across dark wood paneling, and a gleaming 1920s antique car sits parked in the middle of it all like a guest who never checked out.

There is a vintage wooden phone booth tucked to one side, the kind with a folding door and a little seat. Old photographs on the walls document how far this place fell before it climbed back.

You can feel the years in the room, and it smells faintly of wood polish and warm history. The floral rugs, the carpet runners on the staircase, the iron railings, all of it was chosen to send you straight back to 1930.

Follow the staircase up and the second-floor mezzanine opens over the lobby, a piano waiting near the rail. It is the sort of perch where you half expect a big-band number to start up on its own.

Pro tip: give yourself time in the lobby before you even think about your room. This is a building that rewards standing still and looking up.

Rooms That Look Out Over Forever

There are sixty-five guest rooms here, and each one is a little different from the next. That alone tells you something. This is not a hotel where every door opens onto the same beige box.

The furnishings lean into early twentieth-century elegance, with generous square footage, deep soaking tubs, and bathrooms roomy enough to actually move around in. The higher you go, the better the view gets.

From the upper floors you look out over open West Texas, prairie and mesa running clear to the horizon. It is the kind of big empty country that makes a person breathe slower. Sunset from a high window here is a genuine event.

The room categories climb along with the floors. Heritage Rooms and Tower Rooms cover the classics, and then there are the showpieces: the Ryan Suite, the Penthouse, and the Presidential Suite. The top suites stretch past twelve hundred square feet with panoramic views wrapping around the tower.

Modern comforts are here where it counts. You get free Wi-Fi, flat-screen televisions, coffee stations, in-room safes, and Aveda products in those big bathrooms. The plumbing is new, the character is not, and that balance is the whole trick.

Did you know? Room rates here often start around $116 a night, well under what you would pay for a plain roadside box in a bigger city. A historic landmark for chain-hotel money is a rare kind of deal.

What’s Cooking at Settles Grill

Down on the ground floor, Settles Grill is where a lot of guests will tell you the real magic happens. It serves Texan comfort food three meals a day, breakfast through dinner, in a dining room that carries the same 1930s polish as the lobby.

Think steaks and Texas classics, plates that lean familiar with a few modern twists, and a proper sit-down breakfast worth setting an alarm for. There is a burger, there is salmon, and there is room service if you would rather eat looking out that high window.

The kitchen keeps generous hours, breakfast through lunch and again for dinner most days of the week, so an early start or a late table both work. There is also a private dining room that seats up to sixteen for a celebration.

Breakfast is its own quiet argument for booking a room. A plate of eggs and biscuits in that dining room, with the morning light coming through tall windows, is a fine way to start a day of West Texas driving.

Locals treat the Grill as a destination in its own right, not just a hotel amenity. Come hungry, order the steak, and give yourself an unhurried hour.

Regulars are quick to say the kitchen rarely lets anyone down, and the historic dining room does half the work before the food even arrives. Eating well under crystal chandeliers has a way of making a Tuesday feel like an occasion.

The Pharmacy That Became a Parlor

Here is a detail I love. Tucked into the hotel is the Pharmacy Bar and Parlor, and the name is not decoration. It nods to the hotel’s original pharmacy from the early days.

That little counter doubled as the town’s water cooler, the spot where Big Spring gathered to trade news and gossip. A cocktail bar with that kind of backstory hits differently than a sports lounge off a lobby.

Today it splits into two moods. The bar side is lively, a good place to meet friends, catch live music, and work through a serious list of cocktails, beer, and wine.

The parlor side is quieter, with the soft feel of someone’s very handsome living room, all comfortable chairs and low light. It is the kind of hotel bar that makes you want to linger for one more, which is precisely what a hotel bar is supposed to do.

From Oil Money to Neon Lights

Now for the part that makes this building more than pretty. Howard County rancher W.R. Settles and his wife, Lillian, struck oil during the boom of the 1920s. Rather than sit on the windfall, they poured it into a landmark.

They spent around five hundred thousand dollars building a first-class hotel for their dusty West Texas town. They hired Abilene architect David Castle to design it, and he gave them a soaring Art Deco tower meant to be the luxurious stopover between Fort Worth and El Paso.

It opened its doors in 1930, and for decades it was the beating heart of Big Spring, home to grand parties, big conferences, and a guest list that reads like a jukebox. Elvis Presley stayed here. So did Roy Orbison, bandleader Lawrence Welk, and President Herbert Hoover.

Then the story turned. W.R. Settles lost the hotel during the Great Depression, and though it thrived again for years, time eventually caught up. By the 1970s the grand old tower had slid into a flophouse, and in 1980 it closed entirely.

For roughly thirty years it stood empty and dark over downtown, its windows blank and its neon cold. The rescue came from someone who grew up looking at it.

Dallas businessman G. Brint Ryan, a Big Spring native, bought the property in 2007 and committed to a full restoration. The project ran about six years and thirty million dollars, saving the plasterwork, the woodwork, and the bones of David Castle’s original design.

The moment that says it all came when the crew fired up the rooftop neon for the first time in three decades. As Ryan recalled it, “we could hear cars all over town honking.”

The hotel reopened in 2012, its red letters glowing again over the prairie, and the National Register of Historic Places added it in 2013. A whole town got its landmark back.

Big Spring itself takes its name from a real spring that once drew buffalo, mustangs, and cattle herds to this dry stretch of the plains. Long before the oil, the water is what put the place on the map.

The hotel just gave the town something to point at on the skyline. Generations of Big Spring kids grew up under that neon, which is exactly why one of them came back and spent a fortune to relight it.

Grand Rooms, a Pool, and a Whole Lot of Ballroom

The restoration did not stop at the guest floors. The Grand Ballroom and Mezzanine Lobby came back to their full 1930s opulence, and today they host everything from fourteen-person meetings to celebrations of three hundred and up.

Couples book this ballroom for weddings precisely because nothing else nearby looks remotely like it. Beyond the events spaces, guests get a pool, a spa, a fitness center, and off-street parking, a nice touch of the twenty-first century layered under all that Deco glamour.

You can spend a day never leaving the building and never feel like you settled. If you read historical markers and linger over old photographs, this hotel is a small museum you get to sleep inside.

If you just want a comfortable, striking, genuinely different place to stay on a West Texas road trip, it delivers that too. It refuses to be generic, and on a highway full of identical exits, that refusal is worth the drive.

How to Get There

Where: Hotel Settles, 200 E 3rd St, Big Spring, TX 79720

Big Spring sits along Interstate 20 in West Texas, roughly forty miles east of Midland. That makes the hotel an easy stop on a drive across the region, or a destination worth pointing the car toward on purpose.

The nearest major airports are in Midland and Odessa. Settles Grill keeps regular hours for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so try to time your arrival around a meal.

Point the Car West

Some places earn their view of the horizon, and this one earned it twice. Once when oil money raised it, and again when a hometown kid refused to watch it crumble.

So book yourself a high room, order a steak downstairs, and take the long way up the marble staircase. Let the town’s tallest building spoil you for one night.

In a world of hotels that all blur together, you deserve one that dares to be exactly, gloriously itself. This one has been standing tall over the prairie since 1930, and it is only getting better at it.

Featured image: @ Hotel Settles