Home design: Architects making their marks on older neighborhoods
Custom-designed homes can be risky, but there could be a big payoff
Independent Austin architects and designers are making footprints on the cityscape in thoughtful and fiercely original ways.
Drive down a street in Hyde Park lined with bungalows and you’ll probably find a modest jewel of a house tucked behind a tangle of trees.
Who built that? Who lives there? The unfussy lines and calm silhouette say modern, but the tawny limestone and rustic expression are pure Austin. The house is earthy and simple, yet sophisticated. It doesn’t shout, but it grabs your attention.
Homes such as these are emerging in unexpected corners of the city as architects who are schooled in contemporary design, often at the University of Texas School of Architecture, create boutique, one-of-a-kind, custom-built projects. Brimming with heady ideas and knowledgeable about the latest developments in construction technology, they are trying to bridge the gap between art and accessibility.
“Architecture is the art of building,” said Gregory Brooks, the designer and principal of the firm BOX and an alumnus of the UT School of Architecture graduate program. He is also a lecturer in UT’s architectural engineering program.
But architects “are the only artists who can’t afford their own medium.”
Unlike prefabricated or standardized homes built by commercial builders, typically for subdivisions, custom-designed homes by young, experimental architects are built on commission from individual clients.
To the average home buyer, hiring an architect to design a home poses a substantial risk, creatively and financially.
People who hire architects “go out on a limb,” Brooks said. “Austin’s not full of contemporary architecture. That’s not the normal house that you see. . . . If it’s the first time you are building something, it can be scary because creatively you don’t know what you are getting. You can’t walk through it and test-drive it like you can a suburban home.”
Hiring an architect also can be more expensive. There are the design fees — typically anywhere from 6 percent to 20 percent of construction costs, depending on the complexity of the project and the experience of the architect. And those fees are paid up front.
Then there is resale.
“There is no one out there who doesn’t think about the fact that they may not be in the house forever,” Brooks said. Contemporary architects “are making something that people aren’t used to, and certainly when you talk to Realtors they will not encourage you to build something contemporary. ‘Flat roofs? You’re crazy.’ (Contemporary design) is a very small market.”
But “when a house not only works well for the user but is a good work of design, it not only is worth more but it can become a beacon for promoting contemporary design,” Brooks said.
Beth and Bob Schlechter hired Brooks to design a home on a small estate lot that was subdivided, about a third of an acre north of the UT campus. After selling their West Lake Hills home, “a standard family type of house,” when their children left for college, the Schlechters wanted to downsize but “do something a little more contemporary, more modern,” Beth Schlechter said.
Hiring a designer was not unlike commissioning a permanent work of art. At the same time, “we didn’t want to be the eyesore of the neighborhood. We wanted to be integrative. We didn’t want to totally forget the fact that we live in an older neighborhood,” said Schlechter. “Some modern can be kind of severe, so I wanted to soften it up. . . . I did want some walls!”
To that end, while the form and structure of the house is resolutely modern and contemporary, the interior looks “more like a Craftsman house,” Schlechter said, with wide bamboo plank floors, and built-in bookshelves and cabinets made of oak that has a warm, caramel luster. Handcrafted stained-glass windows imbue the house with splashes of color.
Among the artistic features in the house is a “tree tub,” a freestanding minimalist Philippe Starck tub in an upstairs bathroom that appears to be cradled by the limbs of the giant live oak tree visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“In the normal construction trade, if you buy a suburban house, there’s a way you do a tub. You buy a prefab tub, you stick it in, get the fixtures at Home Depot, and you stick them on the wall. With custom design, anything goes,” said Brooks. The “level of imagination for the designer is very exciting.”
Brooks’ creative efforts in the studio were interspersed with productive brainstorming meetings with the clients to produce a home that responds to their needs and desires.
The home is a poem of light and glass. The two-story dwelling has 3,500 square feet, with 1,000 square feet of screened porch and balconies. It also has floor-to-ceiling windows along the walls of the back of the house, and they open onto back gardens and the old oak tree.
The tree dominates half the property, with its winding branches blending seamlessly with the limestone, stucco, wood, deep overhangs and metal roofs, elements that grew out of the Hill Country vernacular and keep the contemporary home integrated into the neighbor- hood.
At night, when the windows might otherwise go black and act as mirrors from the inside, closing the house in, landscape lights flood the exterior to allow an undisturbed view into the gardens. Thin frames of wood partition the windows into quadrants that glow with interior light, creating the effect of a live Mondrian painting.
The blurring between the outside and inside was a central idea for the house: to create an open feeling on a small lot and to preserve the heirloom oak tree. That blurring represents a goal of contemporary architecture to express the unique location of a building.
“I’m trying to figure out how to make residences that look like they belong here, like they grew out of the landscape and the climate here and the culture of how we live in our houses and outside of our houses,” Brooks said. “Outdoor living spaces are a strong part of (Austin’s) heritage. . . . Screened porches and walled gardens are what Texas is about: sitting in the shade and putting your feet in the water and listening to a fountain gurgle, and eating outside every night that you can when the weather’s nice.”
Such architecture breeds sustainability. For example, tall bamboo hedges border the Schlechter home so that there is a relationship between the live bamboo and the interior bamboo floors. “You walk in the house, and you see the bamboo floors and tie it into the garden visually. You get the cycle. And that’s a very sustainable psychological thing. It’s sustainability using bamboo, seeing bamboo, understanding the process of harvesting and using the natural material. These are all sustainable ideas. But they are not done with necessarily the intention that I’m going to save the planet. It just feels like what we should do.”
Playful and unpredictable placement of glass further blurs the inside and the outside, reinforcing the theme of an interplay between the private world and the natural world.
A 20-foot-long slit of plate glass along the floor of the garage comes at the bottom of a large stone wall, letting light in and creating the illusion of the wall levitating. A similar aperture in an upstairs book gallery admits a column of light that cuts diagonally through the space and onto a lacquered wall, acting as a sundial tracking the sun’s full spectrum through the day and the seasons. When the sun is at its peak, in the middle of the summer afternoon, this “wall of moving light,” as Brooks calls it, is awash in light.
A light tower in the reading room emits a steady halo, while a “missing stone” (a concept Brooks learned while working with architect Arthur Andersson) lets in just a fragment of light.
The house is a “gorgeous glass box” yet “very livable,” Beth Schlechter said.
“Most homes are not built with the goal of making art because housing is a basic need and human right,” Brooks said. “So function comes first, but it’s only the start. My creative process is a messy thing to watch. Please don’t look. I’ll call you when it’s over.”
