Feel Free To Touch The Natural Materials Grounding This Austin Abode

For the owners of this Austin abode, nothing beats the look of a natural material that’s been allowed to fully express its innate character. Such freedom, unfortunately, had not been afforded within the couple’s newly acquired house. Its aesthetic—described by architect Mark Richardson as “Texas Hill Country influenced by the horizontality of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style, with a hint of Mediterranean mixed in”—included ample faux finishes, along with a host of columns and arches. “We wanted to tone all of that down, taking things into a warmer, more modern direction,” Richardson continues of the renovation he and his project manager, Daniel Ward, set out to accomplish.

To accommodate the homeowners’ love of entertaining, the house would also need to expand. With builder David Dalgleish and interior designer Blair Burton onboard, the existing primary suite became a game room, the compartmentalized kitchen was opened to the adjacent dining and living areas, and the new primary quarters took shape on one side of the broad pool terrace. “Our design philosophy is to listen—to what excites clients, and also to the site and existing architecture,” Richardson says, noting how he approached merging the original limestone-clad structure with his new interventions. “The more you can work with the existing lines, the more harmonious a result you will achieve,” he adds. “One way we accomplished this was by paying attention to the original stonework and carrying the same coursing from the exterior to the interior.”

To offset those stone finishes with the rich wood accents the homeowners craved, the team specified oak and Douglas fir tongue-and-groove ceilings, rough-sawn oak walls and reclaimed oak beams and trusses inspired by those one might find in an old local barn. The lighter wood components—including a hand-hewn Douglas fir pergola that shades the living room’s soaring new windows—were stained to complement the kitchen’s bespoke walnut cabinetry. “Normally, you wouldn’t put straight-grain Douglas fir with a rough-sawn oak and a tight-grain walnut,” Dalgleish’s project manager, Tony Ezell, says. “But the natural wood tones, with a bit of stain, help to create an interesting combination of visual textures.”

It takes just one barefoot walk across the interior’s limestone, wood and pebble-tiled floors to understand that texture is the bedrock of the resulting design. “Every material is in its pure state,” Burton explains. “The quartzite countertops are leathered and have that feeling of being from the earth. The kitchen hood is copper, and the plumbing fixtures are either galvanized steel or oil-rubbed bronze. You want to touch everything.” Even in the spa-like primary bathroom, walls clad in stone and wood meet custom steel-framed windows, which, despite their industrial materiality, work to bring a sense of lightness to the space. When viewed alone, they are substantial pieces of steel—but when compared to the beams overhead, they come across as a fine detail. Dalgleish adds: “Good design is about contrast and, here, there are juxtapositions of volume, of heaviness and lightness, and of transparency and opacity. It’s those contrasts that create an artistic effect.”

The homeowners’ furnishings, which range widely from old-fashioned pie safes to Eames lounge chairs, presented their own juxtapositions of style and materiality—something the designer readily embraced. In the primary bedroom, she gathered their handmade four-poster walnut bed with a weathered antique bench and modern, tubular-steel-framed armchair. In the living room, chunky new sofas face a fireplace flanked by antique wooden chests. “The scale of the house was such that we wanted to stay away from diminutive pieces,” Burton says, pointing to the living room’s block-like coffee table and the dining room’s tall, built-in custom display shelves. “The furnishings also had to have some architectural interest, because we weren’t using a lot of color or pattern.” 

The aesthetic preferences of the clients also steered the designer away from synthetic, stain-resistant fabrics and more toward wools, linens and leathers—“true materials,” she says, which keep the interiors’ visual flow unruffled. A palette of earthy colors, in turn, maintains continuity with the hues found in nature. “Some houses need to have a lot going on in terms of design because there’s no strong architecture or a view,” Burton explains. “But here, we had both, which allowed us to be raw, earthy and honest.”