Badu Building, Bank building in Llano County, Texas

The Badu Building is a bank building in Llano County featuring native granite walls arranged in a checkerboard pattern and red brick in Renaissance Revival style. The structure sits at the corner of Bessemer Avenue and Tarrant Street and now operates as a restaurant and event venue.

The Badu Building was erected in 1890 by the Llano Improvement and Furnace Company, which had been organized to promote land development, as the home of the newly chartered First National Bank. That company went bankrupt around 1894, and N. J. Badu bought the building at a public auction in 1898. His family owned it until 1980, and from 1907 to 1912 it was leased to the First State Bank of Llano.

The building is now run as a restaurant and private event space called Badu 1891, a name that keeps the year 1890 in view. Its other names, Badu House and Carol Phelan Building, recall the family that held it from 1898 until 1980.

The building stands at the corner of Bessemer Avenue and Tarrant Street in downtown Llano. It now operates as the Badu 1891 restaurant and private event space, so visits depend on dining or event bookings rather than a museum-style tour.

N. J. Badu, who bought the building at a public auction in 1898, was a French-born geologist who had managed the Algona Hotel in Llano and later the Driskill Hotel in Austin. He kept his home in Llano and ran a mineralogy laboratory there.