The Rice stands at 909 Texas Avenue in downtown Houston, and it is the third building on its site. The Republic of Texas used the first building as its capitol from 1837 to 1839, and again from 1842 to 1845. It then became the Capitol Hotel.
In 1881 a five-story hotel replaced it. William Marsh Rice bought it in 1886, and after he died in 1900 it passed to the Rice Institute. Jesse H. Jones built the current seventeen-story, double-winged building in 1913 at a cost of about $3.5 million.
In 1922 the hotel's cafeteria became the first public room in Houston with air-conditioning. The hotel closed in 1977, stood empty for twenty-one years, and reopened in 1998 as apartments called the Post Rice Lofts. Since 2014 it has been called simply The Rice.