Named after nearby Limpia (“clean” in Spanish) Creek, the hotel was constructed of irregularly shaped local red sandstone by the Union Trading Company. It is a two-story rectangular block with load-bearing masonry walls, a hipped, standing-seam metal roof, and several wooden additions, including a second-story verandah that faces the informal square (now a parking lot) between the Union Mercantile Building (1906), an adobe warehouse building (now the Jeff Davis County Library), the Fort Davis State Bank (1911, Campbell and Bange, builders), and a one-story adobe building (1909).
The hotel was built during the Davis Mountain tourism boom that began in the 1890s. It closed in 1953, following a fire, but was reopened in 1978 by a new owner, J. C. Duncan. He operated it as apartments and leased the building’s first floor to a group of astronomers from Harvard University, who had come to the Davis Mountains to build and operate a radio telescope (which still functions on Sproul Ranch, northwest of town). Duncan added a separate dining room and a motel-like cottage section to the hotel.