Perched atop a central Austin hilltop, the Barton Hills residence by Alterstudio Architecture boasts sweeping vistas of the Barton Creek greenbelt. The 7,200-square-foot home is aligned east/west along the slope to optimize its solar orientation and catch the prevailing breezes. It poses an orthogonal datum against which the meandering natural terrain passes and defines two distinct landscape vistas: an unobstructed view to the south and an idyllic, sheltered courtyard to the north.
A steel-clad, horizontal volume contains the primary bedrooms, kitchen and living spaces. Below, a family room opens onto the pool and a sheltered outdoor dining patio. While the design might at first suggest an adherence to orthodox modernist principles, a deeper material poetics underlies its more nuanced architectural agenda.
Steel, rather than posing an omnipresent ordering system, for instance, here provides dexterity to the structure, where at select moments, it can take flight. The exterior palette — composed of wood, Corten steel, board-formed concrete, native stone, and glass — is designed to evolve over time with textures that will mature gracefully along with the surrounding landscape. Such expressions highlight the narrative spatial sequence at the heart of the home, wherein one passes suddenly from the ordinary conditions of suburbia to those of a lush natural enclave, encountering an ever-shifting balance between the rugged and complex, the refined and ordered.
As a family with two active young children, the clients’ primary desires for the project included the design of a central, close-knit series of living spaces that emphasized the importance of time spent outdoors. The clients emphasized that the home should facilitate creative, self-directed discovery and a materially rich but low-tech play environment for their children. The resulting space features a sinuous, double-sided reading nook recessed into the lower concrete walls, and a colorful hidden playroom, housed in the cantilevered volume at the west end of the home, where the clerestories that face uphill to the north establish a privileged vantage only accessible from the top of the children’s climbing wall.
The previously existing house on the site had begun to collapse due to a foundation not suitably engineered for its poor soils. The existing driveway and building footprint were consequently reused to avoid further disturbance of the surrounding flora and to mitigate the danger of a landslide during construction. The new foundation established an adequate foothold on the terrain around which terraces with native planting were installed to control runoff and soil stability. The new landscape design extends the greenbelt wildlife habitat from below while managing stormwater to protect this important local watershed.
Alterstudio design team: Kevin Alter, Ernesto Cragnolino, Tim Whitehill, Michael Woodland, Matt Slusarek, Haifa Hammami
Contractor: Clean Tag
Structural: MJ Structures
MEP: Positive Energy
Landscape: Word + Carr
Photography by Casey Dunn.
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