4300 Speedway / Austin, Texas

4300 Speedway was purpose-built as a post office in 1967, on a main thoroughfare of Austin’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood. It functioned as a post office for over half a century, until USPS terminated its lease in 2021. Since then a new kind of community amenity has been forged in its place. 

Our light-touch design strategy kept the footprint and exterior brick shell in tact, while demising the structure into four independent tenant spaces with generous new steel-framed apertures for each.  An elegant exterior canopy and walkway was added along the length of the building, creating a shaded pedestrian-friendly buffer between the structure and parking lot. The building received a new roof, exterior paint and upgraded utilities, while the former loading dock was earmarked for a landscaped outdoor seating area. 

Following the shell renovation, the 10,000sf building has been steadily transformed into a thriving neighborhood hub of locally-owned businesses, including a bookstore, boutique grocer, restaurants and Pilates studio.  In a city where commercial operations are typically banished to neighborhood edges it highlights the value that locating modestly-scaled businesses in the heart of our neighborhoods can add to the quality of our urban lives.

In 2024, the project was awarded a Preservation Austin Merit Award for Rehabilitation.