This house addition — approximately 1100 SF of new space — stretches and grows out of an existing low-slung, 1950’s ranch house in the Barton Hills neighborhood in Austin, Texas. A vertical tower of interwoven levels, the design weaves together two home offices, as well as a family living room, reading room, play loft, and roof deck for two creative tech professionals and their young child.

The slender addition stretches one-room wide up to the panoramic Greenbelt view. It takes its scale, positioning and massing from the original house while it’s envelope flexes from level to level, nesting the spaces into the surrounding trees and creating carefully-framed views.
We kept expensive cabinetry to a minimum, and instead designed a network of exposed framing and digitally-fabricated plywood shapes — work-surfaces, benches, shelves and railings – to stich the 5 vertically-staggered levels of program. With these lighter, plywood elements, we stitched the kitchen and dining of the existing house to the new living area, the living to her office, and her office to his. The levels continue up to a reading/ view space, a kids’ playroom/ sleeping loft, and finally to a rooftop deck.

For this project, our client asked us to create a 1100sf small house, or rental apartment on the back side of an existing 1940’s house near the University of Texas campus.
We elected to put the 2 private bedrooms — for the likely independent university student tenants — on the ground floor, whose entrances are accessed off of a glowingly lit stair atrium. We envisioned the atrium to be outdoors and clad large parts of it with a Poly-Gal translucent wall system. We left parts of the wall framing exposed and clad other parts in plywood, moves which underscored the indoor-outdoor feeling of the stair area.
As you move to the second-level living, and view to the beloved UT Tower, you experience interior windows, and cladding which further blur the clear distinction between what is an indoor and outdoor space. Materials are simple, exposed, durable and not too precious in most cases: fitting and lasting we hope for the tenants who live there.