Exclusive: First look at Austin Garden & Studio, a hospitality compound at Inn Cahoots

The project started with the crazy idea that noisy, crowded social events don't belong in residential Austin districts.

"Party places should not be in neighborhoods," said Kristen Carson, who quietly opened the Inn Cahoots hotel and private events space in the 1200 block of East Sixth Street in 2019. "They should be on Sixth Street, where they can be noisy."

Now Carson and her business partner, Michelle Chuang, are opening the hotel's adjacent Austin Garden & Studio at Inn Cahoots — as well as, on certain days, portions of the hotel, including a suave cocktail lounge, Bar Mischief, and a rooftop speakeasy, IYKYK — to the general public.

During the past four years, the hotel, which includes flexible meeting spaces with movable walls on the first floor, has hosted a multitude of corporate events — for Fender guitars, Bose speakers, TikTok chat, for instance — along with retreats, wedding parties, anniversaries and, once, a convocation of priests.

The hotel, which consists of five condo-style suites, each with a private living room, kitchen and multiple bedrooms, is often booked by just one "group travel" customer. The place is in particularly high demand during South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

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Their expanded hospitality compound includes two large gardens with outdoor chairs, tables, sofas, three bars, one food truck so far (with two more planned), three performance stages, a highly distributed sound system to cut down on noise spill, and elbow room for more than 2,000 guests on dates when maximum attendance is permitted by the city of Austin for special events.

There's nothing quite like it in Austin.

Who are Kristen Carson and Michelle Chuang?

In an earlier era, the University of Texas McCombs School of Business strove to place graduates in promising jobs at large corporate entities. During the past decades, however, UT has just as frequently planted the seeds for future entrepreneurship among its students.

Carson and Chuang pursued ambitious goals at UT. Carson, 37, carried a double major in marketing and mechanical engineering. Chuang, 40, got her bachelor's and master's degrees in accounting. They met while working at one of those traditional corporate entities — professional services giant Deloitte.

Yet both were itching to start — then scale up — completely new businesses.

To start, Carson found a way to transform underperforming West Campus apartments into housing for visiting international students. She called her firm Simply International, which she expanded to Alabama and Massachusetts until the COVID-19 pandemic paused international studies.

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Chuang, once Carson's housemate, at first took jobs in larger Texas cities, before returning to Austin in 2010 to start a consulting business and to restore her first house in Cherrywood. She joined Carson's East Austin hospitality project around the time it opened in 2019, but returned to her consulting work when COVID-19 hit. She permanently partnered with Carson earlier this year for the Inn Cahoots expansion.

The partners had seen what short-term leases had done to quiet neighborhoods, so the idea of a hospitality complex atop a large piece of property on busy East Sixth, historically part of a Hispanic commercial district mixed with a few houses, made perfect sense as a joint project.

What is the Austin Garden & Studio at Inn Cahoots?

A grand opening for the newly public spaces on the campus, accessed at 1209 E. Sixth St., is planned for the weekend of July 21.

The anchor for the compound is a wooden structure with high ceilings reputed to be the original studio and offices for KMXX, the city's first Spanish-language radio station, and then for decades the home of Clayworks ceramics studio and gallery.

Naturally, Carson and Chuang call this bar and gathering space the "Studio." It includes a performance stage and serves as the check-in counter for the hotel. The Studio will serve as the official FIFA Women’s World Cup Watch headquarters.

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To the west, through an unexpected panel, the Studio opens to a "Secret Garden," a large open space furnished with elaborate couches, chairs and other outdoor furniture for private events.

To the east is the even larger, public "Austin Garden," landscaped with indigenous plants and white picnic tables laid out on artificial turf. This space contains the compound's largest live stage and the first of several planned food trucks, Gobble Gobble, which serves turkey burgers among other comfort food.

The general public will be restricted from much of the small hotel. Exceptions will include the stylish cocktail bar clad in wood paneling and a rooftop "speakeasy," reached from an unmarked door on Attayac Street. Both will be open during limited days of the week.

The only other building on the same urban half-block is Buenos Aires, a longtime Argentinian restaurant.

Who will use the hospitality compound?

"It's already become a mecca for music in a weird way," Carson said. Many of the parties, special events and art shows so far have been connected to live music. "We want it to be an asset to the community."

"We want to make it feel as if it's your own backyard," Chuang said.

The partners are eager to donate the Studio space for more charity events. Among the recent guests have been the Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and other nonprofits.

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During the past decade, the city of Austin, state of Texas, courts and interest groups have tangled over which regulations can apply to short-term leases, many of them unlicensed, and which can still provoke social clashes in residential areas.

"We are actually licensed," Carson said. "It's part of the service we guarantee our customers. We're in a commercial zone and are regularly inspected. We are ADA compliant and enforce loudness ordinances. Our guests want to be very near restaurants and bars, not in a residential area.

"And they want to have a professional staff on hand," Carson continues. "There's been a backlash against poor management."

Carson and Chuang, who are looking for other cities to target with their brand of group-travel experiences, have received offers to develop their property into a mid-rise tower.

"Some of the offers are pretty crazy," Carson said. "Instead, we want build something iconic that preserves part of what Austin used to be."

"We bring together all the ingredients for an unexpected evening for friends and family," Chuang said. "That evening might start at the hotel and then move on to the public spaces. We aim to make sure they have everything they need for a magical evening."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin Garden & Studio event space open to public on East Sixth Street