Austin's downtown skyline has spent the better part of three years rebalancing itself around a question no city had to answer at scale before the pandemic: what do you do with a tower whose office program is no longer viable? Related Texas just delivered the most visible answer yet. The New York-based developer's flagship Austin project — One Lady Bird Lake, originally announced in 2022 as a 475,000-square-foot Class-A office tower — has emerged from a multi-year redesign as a 298-residence waterfront tower, with the team unveiling the first rendering of the new vision in early June.
The 18-story building will rise on a 3.3-acre site at 151 South 1st Street on the southern shore of Lady Bird Lake — a parcel currently serving as the parking lot for the adjacent Hyatt Regency Austin. The residential program splits across two ownership categories under one roof: 101 condominiums in the western wing closest to the lake shore and 197 rental apartments in the eastern wing, each with its own dedicated lobby. Units range from one to three bedrooms across approximately 494,000 square feet of multifamily program. The ground floor adds 10,400 square feet of waterfront restaurant space spread across two restaurants and 3,200 square feet of retail, all oriented toward views of Lady Bird Lake and the downtown Austin skyline.
The site sits in Austin's South Central Waterfront District — a planning area the city has designated for high-density mixed-use redevelopment as it extends the downtown skyline south of the lake. Related Texas, the Austin platform of Related Companies led by Texas President Mike Iannacone, is one of the most active developers in the district. The firm is concurrently advancing the nearby 500 South Congress PUD — a 6.5-acre redevelopment that will include up to 950 residences across condominiums and apartments, retail, offices, and a hotel — which Iannacone has described as "the new heart of the South Central Waterfront." Adjacent to One Lady Bird Lake, the Texas Department of Transportation is funding a $25 million boardwalk through the lakefront corridor to compensate for parkland lost during the widening of I-35 through central Austin.
The design team brings the kind of international pedigree more often seen in Manhattan or Miami than central Texas. New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) serves as architect of record — the firm behind 30 Hudson Yards, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and One Vanderbilt. Interior design is by Workshop/APD, the New York studio whose residential portfolio includes work for some of Manhattan's most prominent developers. Landscape architecture is by Austin-based TBG Partners, and engineering is by GarzaEMC.
The City of Austin approved the project's site plan on July 1, 2025, clearing the regulatory path for construction to advance. Power Design — the project's electrical, mechanical, and low-voltage contractor — lists the project's completion date as February 2028, with the Urbanize Austin reveal confirming move-ins expected in early 2028. The decision to redesign the original office program came in 2023, when Austin's office vacancy rate climbed to its highest level in decades and Related's leadership concluded that a residential conversion would deliver the better long-term return on the project's 750-foot waterfront frontage.
For Austin's downtown, One Lady Bird Lake represents both a single project and a category test: whether the post-pandemic pivot from office to residential can produce buildings that hold up architecturally over decades. The June rendering reveal — combined with a February 2028 completion target — suggests that Related, KPF, and Workshop/APD are betting it can.