Like the state itself, the rolling plains of Texas Hill Country teem with Spanish Revival architecture, but it was the highlands of another famous place that provided more apt inspiration for a new construction family home in Austin that’s not your typical historical reboot.
“Before this project started, I had spent some time in England seeing the work of Oliver Hill,” says San Antonio architect Michael G. Imber, who was impressed with the Arts and Crafts architect’s paean to the Alhambra at Marylands, the estate Hill built in Surrey in the 1930s. “His view of the Spanish Revival style is so different than we have here in the US. He had a fresh eye on the materiality and shape of the forms and masses.”
That interpretation made plenty of sense in Austin, where the architecture skews more contemporary and less Mission inspired than in Imber’s home base of San Antonio. Working with interior designer Vanessa Alexander, of AD PRO Directory firm Alexander Design, and Dalgleish Construction Company, he conceived a U-shaped sequence of spaces that surround a central courtyard and feel as though they’ve been carved into the landscape, creating volumes both intimate and grand throughout the home. “It’s not about being ornamental,” Imber says of the gentle flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, which include a traditional belvedere that looks out over the city and beyond. “There’s a more humanistic, sculptural approach.”
Accentuating a hand-wrought aesthetic was also the design intention of Alexander, who sought to soften and modernize some of the architecture’s classical interior elements to reflect the homeowners’ preference for a more relaxed lifestyle before construction even began. For her part, she looked to the simplicity of form in Puglia’s historic masseria and cave dwellings for inspiration. “There’s an authenticity in the context of these really weighty, hand-hewn materials that were not overly manipulated, allowing the space to breathe and be energetically light and youthful,” she explains.
