This Grand West Texas Hotel Has Guarded Its 1930s Glamour for Nearly a Century

The first time I pushed through the front doors, I stopped walking before I meant to. My eyes went up, then up again, following a double marble staircase as it split and climbed toward a mezzanine wrapped in iron railings.

Crystal chandeliers threw light across a terrazzo floor. Somewhere above me, a golden letter S curled into the metalwork like a signature. I just stood there for a minute, keys still in my hand, grinning at a lobby built ninety-some years before I ever walked into it.

I had driven a long stretch of flat West Texas highway to get here, half expecting a simple roadside stopover. What I found instead was a fifteen-story tower of quiet old glamour, standing tall over a small downtown, looking almost exactly as it did the year it opened.

This is Hotel Settles, in Big Spring, and it has watched over the Texas plains since 1930. It closed once. It sat empty for decades.

Then a hometown boy spent thirty million dollars bringing it all the way back. Below, let me walk you through why it earns every mile of the drive.

A Staircase That Stops You Cold

Let me stay in that lobby a moment, because it is the whole promise of the place in one room. The floor is terrazzo, polished smooth and cool underfoot.

The staircase is marble, and it does that grand old thing where it rises, divides, then carries you up to a balcony on both sides. Follow the iron railings and you will find those golden S motifs worked into the metal, one letter for the family that built it all.

The chandeliers overhead are the real article, restored to hang exactly the way they did when the hotel first switched them on. The whole room is Art Deco to its bones, all clean lines and confident angles.

You feel the age here in the best way. Nothing is fake, nothing is themed. This is a building that was made with care once and cared for again, and standing in it feels like being let in on a secret the rest of the highway drove right past.

Rooms With Room to Spare

When I finally climbed those stairs to my room, I was ready for the usual trade. Grand old hotels can be gorgeous downstairs and tight upstairs. This one keeps the generosity going all the way up.

The guest rooms are genuinely large, with proper sitting areas and bathrooms that hand you a soaking tub, a roomy shower, and counter space you can actually spread out on. The furnishings lean into the 1930s look without turning the room into a museum you are afraid to touch.

Ask about the Tower Rooms if you want the view. They come in a few varieties, including Sunrise Terrace and Sunset Terrace rooms, and the names tell you exactly what you are paying for. Wake up high above Big Spring and watch the wide West Texas sky do its thing.

There is a room called the Judge’s Chambers, too, and it comes with a story I will get to. Pro tip: if you love the history, ask the front desk which rooms carry the old names. They light up telling you.

Supper and Cocktails Under the Old Roof

I came back downstairs hungry, and the hotel makes that easy. The Settles Grill sits on the ground floor and serves Texan comfort food across breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a private dining room tucked off to the side for a bigger table.

The service is the kind you remember. My plate came out warm and my coffee never ran dry. The room had that low, easy hum of a place the locals treat as their own.

One traveler called it the finest hotel restaurant in the whole Permian Basin, and after dinner I understood the confidence. This is a small West Texas city, and people drive in from the surrounding towns just to eat here.

Then there is the Pharmacy Bar and Parlor, which earns its name honestly. The front of the building really did hold a pharmacy in the old days, and now the same corner mixes classic cocktails alongside a long list of beer and wine.

It splits into two moods. There is a lively bar side, and a quieter parlor where you can sink into a chair and let the day drain away. My vote goes to the parlor, a good bourbon, and no particular hurry to be anywhere.

What gets me is the setting. You are sipping a cocktail in a room that once dispensed prescriptions, in a hotel that once counted a king’s earl among its guests. Few bars in Texas can say the same, and none say it this quietly.

How Oil Money Built a Skyscraper on the Plains

Now for the part that makes this more than a pretty hotel. In the late 1920s, oil turned up on ranch land belonging to Will and Lillian Settles, near Big Spring. Almost overnight, a ranching couple had a fortune on their hands.

They spent a piece of it building something the plains had never seen. They hired architect David S. Castle, and on October 1, 1930, they opened a solid concrete, fifteen-story, one-hundred-fifty-room hotel that rose 174 feet over a town of a few thousand people.

For years it was the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso. Sit with that a second. Across a run of Texas measured in hundreds of miles, this small-town hotel stood higher than anything around it, a lighthouse for the whole flat horizon.

People compared it to the finest hotels of its day, and the guest list backed the boast. Elvis Presley passed through. So did bandleader Lawrence Welk, President Herbert Hoover, and Jerry Allison, the drummer who kept time for Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

The Judge and the Rooms That Remember

Here is that room’s story. The hotel once hosted Joseph Heneage Finch, the seventh Earl of Aylesford, an English nobleman who landed in West Texas after a scandal back home. Locals took to calling him “The Judge,” and the nickname stuck to the man and, eventually, to a room.

Today the meeting rooms carry names that keep the region’s history close. The T and P room nods to the old Texas and Pacific Railroad. The Cosden room recalls the oil business that built the town. And the Judge’s Chambers keeps the earl in the story forever.

Did you know a single hotel could hold this much of a town’s memory? Walk the halls and you keep bumping into it: a name here, a photograph there, a plaque explaining who mattered and why.

The Grand Ballroom is the crown of it. Rebuilt to its original detail, it still hosts weddings and galas the way it did the year the hotel opened, its high ceilings and warm light doing most of the decorating.

Thirty Years of Waiting, Then a Rescue

The boom did not last, and I want to tell this part straight because the comeback needs it. When the oil economy of West Texas cooled and downtown quieted, the hotel could no longer carry itself. It closed its doors in 1982.

For roughly thirty years, the tower stood silent. Fixtures were carried off. Pigeons settled into the grand rooms where guests once danced. The tallest building for a hundred miles waited a long, patient wait for someone to see what it could be again.

Then in 2006, a Big Spring native named G. Brint Ryan looked at the old place and saw the hotel it used to be. He bought the building and committed to bringing it all the way back, with no shortcuts anywhere.

The restoration ran about thirty million dollars and took years of careful work. The staircase, the chandeliers, the terrazzo, all of it was saved or remade to fit. On December 28, 2012, the doors swung open again.

Poolside, Rooftop, and a Little Bliss

The Settles is not all velvet and old photographs, though. Step out back and you find a proper outdoor retreat, with a swimming pool, a hot tub, and a courtyard made for a slow afternoon under that big open sky.

There is a day spa on site, the Settles Bliss, for a manicure, a pedicure, or a little pampering after a long drive. A fitness studio stays open around the clock for anyone who cannot skip a workout even on a getaway.

What I love is how the modern comforts hide inside the old bones. You get the fast Wi-Fi and the good water pressure and the clean towels, wrapped in a building that never once gave up its 1930s soul. That balance is the whole magic of the place.

What to Know Before You Go

Big Spring sits right off Interstate 20, so the hotel is an easy pull-off on a West Texas road trip. You are about three minutes from the highway and a short drive from Big Spring State Park.

It also makes a fine base if you are exploring the Permian Basin. Midland is roughly forty minutes west, so you can spend the day out and still come home to that lobby and a nightcap in the parlor.

Save an hour for the park while you are here. A scenic loop climbs a bluff for a long view across the plains, and it pairs perfectly with a night in the tallest building in town.

The hotel earned its landmark status the hard way. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1987 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, the year after it reopened to guests.

Did you know a night in a genuine piece of Texas history often costs less than a plain chain room in a bigger city? With a spa, a great restaurant, and that lobby waiting downstairs, it is a stay worth planning a trip around.

How to Get There

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

Aim for downtown Big Spring and you truly cannot miss it. It is still the tallest thing on the skyline, exactly as Will and Lillian Settles intended almost a hundred years ago.

Start Planning Your West Texas Stay

Some places you visit for one big attraction. This one you visit for the feeling, the way a grand old building makes you slow down and pay attention. It rewards the traveler who notices things, and West Texas has more of those travelers than the guidebooks let on.

Book a Tower Room, order supper at the Grill, and take the long way up that marble staircase at least once. West Texas has kept this one tall and shining for nearly a century, and it is more than ready for you to come see it.

Featured image: @ Hotel Settles