Built by two backpacks and a bad idea that worked.
Tierra started as a print shop, spent years empty, and became the hostel its founders kept wishing existed.
A hostel we’d actually want to stay in
In 2015, Mars and Danny got priced out of Austin during a festival week and slept in a rental car. The next morning, over two-dollar tacos, they decided Austin needed a hostel that didn’t feel like a layover.
A year later they signed the lease on a 1923 print shop on East 6th: peeling paint, a dead press in the back, pecan trees out behind. They did the demolition themselves, painted the first mural with neighbors, and opened with twelve bunks and a borrowed turntable.
Now: thirty-four beds, a roof deck, four hundred records, and a guest book in forty languages. The turntable is on its third needle.
A century on East 6th
- 1923
The print shop goes up
A brick commercial row rises on East 6th: a job printer on the ground floor, storage above. The press in the back room runs show posters for dance halls across Central Texas.
- 1978
Records move in
A Tejano label takes the building as a warehouse. Guests still find 45s wedged behind the baseboards, and the best ones go straight into the house crates.
- 2009
The quiet years
The building sits empty while East Austin changes around it. The pecan trees out back keep producing anyway, and neighbors use the yard for birthday parties.
- 2016
We find it
Mars and Danny sign the lease with a handshake clause from the landlord: keep the trees, keep the gate open to the alley mural wall. Both promises survived.
- 2017
Tierra opens
Twelve bunks, one bathroom line, and a first guest: a cyclist from Oaxaca who stayed five nights and painted the hummingbird by the front door.
- 2019
The roof deck
Guests build the deck over one long spring: a carpenter from Berlin, an electrician from Guadalajara, and a structural engineer who happened to be in the 8-bed dorm.
- Today
The beam
Everyone who helps out signs the deck beam before they leave. It is running out of room.
Cheap on price, never on purpose
Thirty-four beds. That’s the whole house, and that’s the whole plan.
Small means the staff learns your name by the second coffee, the kitchen never has more than one person waiting for a burner, and quiet hours work because everyone at the long table agreed to them.
We hire travelers and locals in roughly equal measure, pay above the Austin hospitality median, and every spring an East Side artist repaints the yard mural wall, chosen by vote and paid up front.
“A hotel sells you a room. A good hostel hands you the city and says go. We’re here for the second thing.”
Mars & Danny, founders
Come add your name to the beam.
The house has been collecting travelers since 2017. There’s a bunk with your name on it.