Lone Star Spa
May 1, 2005
You would never guess that Lake Austin Spa Resort is the brainchild of two
former
fraternity brothers going through a midlife crisis. When
co-owners Mike McAdams
and Billy Rucks—best friends since their days at
Louisiana State
University—approached 40, they found themselves wanting
to get out of their
respective careers in real estate and oil. “I never
dreamed that this was
something I’d get into,” confesses McAdams. The
serene lakefront resort, located
just outside Austin, Texas, was
designed to mimic the experience of staying at a
friend’s lake house .
. . that is, a very wealthy friend’s lake house.
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A screened-in treatment room with views
of the hill country. (Click image to enlarge)
McAdams’ 13 years with the Trammell Crow Co., one of the largest real estate developers in the world, had given him a background in both real estate and architectural design, while Rucks had been running a successful oil company in Louisiana. Combining their skills and assets, the two purchased the property—a run-down series of buildings that had formerly been a spa—eight years ago. “We would kid that we had bought Green Acres,” says McAdams. “It was in such bad condition that people used to pull up to the gates and turn around to go home when they saw how ugly it was. But it was a beautiful location on a clean body of water across from a nature preserve, and we saw it as a blank slate.”
Completed in phases, the resort has 40 guest rooms, which were the first spaces to undergo a renovation. Theoriginal 10 rooms of the spa were built close to the shore as a fishing camp in the 1940s, but the current building codes would not allow the partners to construct anything new so close to the lake. Building codes also mandated that they could not increase the size of the property, but outdoor gardens were added to the back and terraces to the front, providing more space while still keeping the original footprint. The remaining rooms, which had been added on in the 1950s and 1980s, were rebuilt to accommodate couples and groups.
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