Designing our Central Austin Remodel
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:46 am 
By Ryan BrownThis is the third post about my modern remodel in Austin, Texas. Click here for all ‘My Remodel’ posts.
As I covered in the Home Search post, we considered our remodeling options when we purchased our home. We found a small home on a big-enough lot and began to plan our project.
Starting Point
The original home sits towards the front of a long, narrow city-size lot with homes on either side. There are several medium sized trees on the property and one large Elm on the North property line, all of which shade the rear of the house (West) from the afternoon sun. Here’s a top view of my rough model (North is up):
While the existing garage was moments away from collapse, the house was structurally sound. We wanted to re-use as much of it as possible. Here is the floorplan:
You can see that the home was originally a 3 bedroom 1 bath with a small living room and kitchen. We think the rear addition was a closed-in back-porch that was completed in the 1970’s or 1980’s. It wasn’t well built, and had several structural issues.
Here are some photos of the original house:
Design Goals – Fashion and Function
With a long and narrow lot, an existing house, and several good sized trees, we knew our remodel/addition design would be challenging. We did our best to keep our program simple and to stay open to our architect’s ideas. Here is a list of our ‘functional’ criteria:
- Open and connected common areas (living, dining, kitchen …)
- Strong connection to the outdoors (lots of glass, outdoor living)
- Energy efficient design (minimize solar heat gain, maximize breeze …)
- Main floor master and guest bedrooms
- Secluded office (I like quiet, my wife likes to hide my mess, win-win)
- Option for separate studio and workshop
As for fashion, our tastes lean towards Modern and MCM architecture/design, however we also wanted our home to relate to the design elements of our neighborhood (mostly Craftsman and some Victorian). An interesting challenge, so we left this up to our architect :). Lets see how we did before this post gets any longer.
Design Details
Below is the layout of our remodel/addition. You can see we re-oriented the spaces in the original home, while adding a kitchen, sitting room, and master suite.
The key challenge in our design turned out to be the large tree just behind the old addition. Fortunately we were able to use this to our advantage and design a courtyard around it. This is one of our favorite elements of the new design.
The kitchen opens to this courtyard, and is connected to the living/dining area in the old house. We also added a clerestory to bring light into the Living/Dining room and allow for ventilation.
Not shown above – there is a room above the master suite, which is my (secluded) office. Finally, our architect designed an optional secondary workshop/studio structure at the back of the lot. Here are a few images of the mostly-accurate 3d model:
With that our architect addressed all of our needs while keeping the design within our budget. At each step he provided suggestions that were usually right on target and often saved us money. Needless to say, we are happy clients!
Great! So who is your architect?
In Austin we are fortunate to have many amazing architects. Guiding my wife and I through the design process was my good friend from college, Robert Shelton. Robert works here in Austin and has designed several residential and municipal projects. He designed one of my more popular listings, a ‘Hill-Country Modern’ home with a view, which I will be re-posting soon.
Robert’s website is under construction, so if you’d like to contact him about your project in the near term go ahead and send me an email – Ryan at InspiredAustin dot com. I will update this post with his website as soon as it is ready.
Stay tuned for my next post – Finding a Builder.
