While many of us changed our priorities during the pandemic, homeowners Taylor Collins and Katie Forrest decided to change their lifestyles. In 2020, the couple and their young family lived during the week in their hometown of Austin, Texas, and spent weekends working on a bison, hog, and chicken farm an hour and a half away in Fredericksburg. Their custom home in the city was decidedly less urban than most, but it was located on a property with preserved views of the Barton Creek Greenbelt, making it a great place to live in the lap of nature. It gave the impression of being there, but it was nothing like the wide open spaces that the Hill Country offers. That year, they decided to move to the ranch full-time and worked with Austin-based design firm Baldrige Architects to create a place for family living that valued their connection to the land. I did.
“The goal of our project was to modernize historic settler homes in this part of Texas,” Collins explains. “Homes here in the 1800s always had a breeze and were designed to take advantage of the ecosystem's prevailing wind and sun patterns throughout the day. For our home, it was a functional architectural approach. Early in the pandemic, the Fredericksburg property was home to a 1,934-square-foot dogtrot-style home with a barn, feed silo, and breezeway-separated bedroom and dining wing. There was a mixture of existing historical buildings such as. Collins and Forrest built this small house as a weekend retreat, but in order to live and run their business there full-time, they needed to rethink and expand the house. Baldrige Architects renovated and designed the complex with a surrounding gable-roofed volume surrounded by a porch, creating an approximately 4,400-square-foot home with outdoor living most days of the year .
“The separation is what really makes this work,” says lead architect Burton Baldridge, who previously designed the Austin family home with colleague Brian Bedrosian. “The spaces in between are important.” In the spirit of the Central Texas dogtrot, the center of the home is hollow, with a carport and walkway to access the separate sleeping and living wings. A gable roof covers the entire new construction of the home, visually integrating the bedroom, kitchen, office, dining and living room, home gym, and breezeway. Most of these spaces have outdoor covered porches built continuously like wraparound terraces, and carports have roofs that allow light to penetrate into the interior of the home while providing protection from wet weather. Comes with a corrugated polycarbonate section. Because the project involved both renovation and new construction, Baldridge and his team carefully selected materials, aiming to make old and new indistinguishable. The exterior is clad in flatsawn Douglas fir and COR-TEN steel siding with clear cedar vertical battens. The porch overhang is supported by steel beams and Douglas fir and steel columns, which are left untreated to patina naturally in the elements. The same steel is also used in the ceiling trusses, creating a particularly stunning effect in the monumental Dining Room.
The interior is constructed primarily of white oak and includes many built-ins designed by the architects to integrate storage, from a wet bar to a custom office and podcast studio to ebony kitchen cabinets. Masu. Elsewhere, the architects chose hand-crafted finishes, such as gypsum plaster walls and terracotta zellige tiles. Most of the house has external doors and windows that open onto the porch and the countryside beyond, making the space warm and sunny. This provides a perfect backdrop for the family's collection of what Collins calls “natural treasures,” including arrowheads that Collins found on site. Daughter, Scout. Most of the furniture was hand-selected by Forrest, using natural materials and materials within the contemporary furniture to balance rustic antiques, such as his large dining table and his BluDot leather chair set. I prioritized color.
Beyond the collected decorations, the real focal point of this home is the surrounding ranch. Not only are families constantly aware of their environment, they are confronted with it every day as they move to and from their pavilion-like residence.
“Not many people want to live like this,” Baldridge admits. “But I'm really grateful that they did that because I think this plan is extraordinary.” “The design of this home encourages us to spend more of our lives outdoors. ' added Mr Collins. This is quite an unusual requirement for a family that was once interested in the city but now wants to enjoy life as a rancher.