Ambassador Hotel gets second life as apartments

Update, 1:15 p.m. May 10: A new filing from OHT today lists the same project but with construction costs at $60 million, with an estimated completion by Jan. 1, 2026.

Original post: From the ashes, luxury apartments will rise.

OHT Partners’ development plans for the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Dallas have been revealed. The firm bought the property at 1300 South Ervay Street after fire destroyed the historic hotel in 2019. 

A planned seven-story, 299-unit multifamily project will be aptly named the Ambassador, according to a Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing. It will cost a whopping $113 million or $378,000 per unit to construct, with work starting this September and delivery scheduled for summer 2026, although plans are preliminary and subject to change.

The development will have four stories of parking with two underground and two above. The third level will include an amenity area, but no other details have yet to be revealed. OHT did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Ambassador Hotel was one of Dallas’ first historic landmarks, and Jim Lake Companies bought the long-vacant hotel in 2015 with plans for a mixed-use redevelopment. The local developer was working out details of the project when a late-night fire swiftly burned down the building in May 2019. 

“The Ambassador was just iconic to the city, and not a day goes by where somebody doesn’t tell me that exact same thing,” Jim Lake Jr. told the Dallas Morning News a month after the fire. “That emboldens us to do something to honor it going forward. We’re going to grab what we can from history and preserve it and go forward. I gotta move forward. I can’t live in the past. And I can’t undo what has been done.”

No arrests were ever made in connection to the mysterious blaze, and the firm sold the site to Austin-based OHT Partners in July 2022.

Built in 1904, the Ambassador was first called the Majestic, and was believed to be the oldest luxury hotel still standing in Dallas. Located next to Dallas’ Old City Park in the Cedars neighborhood, the six-story hotel was considered a high rise at the height of its popularity, attracting famous guests and former U.S. Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft and Woodrow Wilson.

It changed hands several times over the years, being repurposed as a senior housing community and then a religious center. By 1982, the Great Texas Development Corporation bought the Ambassador and announced it would complete a major renovation. After the company declared bankruptcy and reorganized as TAP Historic Properties, it opened the property once again as a luxury hotel in 1983, but it closed again in the ’90s.

OHT has been on a multifamily spree across Texas in recent years and is developing a number of major projects across Texas, including a 750-unit project in Austin and the 270-unit Lenox Cooper in Arlington. OHT had over 1,200-units in its DFW construction pipeline in 2022, according to its website.