When this house in Austin’s Hyde Park neighborhood went on the market in 2020, a lot of people assumed that it would be bought and torn down. It had been built 70 years earlier, and it showed its age—the front yard was overgrown, and dirt, or mold, or both, crawled up the exterior board-and-batten siding. The lot was large—almost two-thirds of an acre—so the possibility of subdividing it loomed, and the real estate agent marketed it as a “rare developer opportunity.”

Before: Front Exterior

This was during the early days of the Covid pandemic, and Chanel and Eric Tarlo were taking a lot of walks around their neighborhood. They were only a block away from their own cute Craftsman bungalow, when Chanel noticed this house.

After: Front Exterior

“It was super inconspicuous when you walked past it, but so unique for this neighborhood,” says Chanel, explaining that there are only a handful of midcentury homes on the block. “Then I stumbled on it online, and saw that all the exciting things about this house were hidden behind it.”

Tucked away in the backyard was an unusual addition: a cantilevered wing with a bright tomato-orange metal staircase up the side. Chanel, a stylist and producer, showed the listing to Eric, a tech entrepreneur who’s “dabbled in real estate,” he says, and the two talked about how cool it was, and then moved on.

Before: Rear Exterior

After: Rear Exterior

But a few months later, after walking by the house many more times, Chanel wondered if it had ever sold, and checked the listing again. “They had significantly dropped the price,” recalls Chanel. “That’s when we were like, ‘Oh, this is interesting. Maybe we should go check it out.’”

Their first walkthrough quickly revealed the amount of work the house needed, from the faulty wiring to the leaking roof. “It was quite a labor of love both inside and out,” says Eric. But the appeal was threefold: It had so much more yard space for their two children, Chanel was eager to flex her design chops on a fixer-upper, and they’d be saving a house in the process.

“Chanel has been known to see a house and be like, ‘I must save this home,’” says Eric. Chanel agrees: “My heart hurts when houses get torn down. I couldn’t imagine that happening here, just because of its potential.”

Before: Rear Exterior

After: Rear Exterior

But first, they needed an architect—and there was only one they wanted to work with: Scott Parks of the Dallas-based Scott Parks Studio, whom Chanel had met in college via his husband. (They were in an a capella group together at the University of Texas at Austin.) She had sent Parks the listing months earlier and there were many back-and-forth texts about it, “daydreaming,” says Chanel.

“Scott is a great friend and aside from that, he’s probably one of the most talented people I know in the world of design,” says Chanel. “There was just no one else I wanted to geek out over it with.” Adds Eric: “I don't know that we would’ve even bought the house had we not known that we would be working with him.”

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

On his first visit, Parks could see the vision of the original architect, George L. Walling. “It had a really clear expression, because of these stone walls that extend out into the landscape, and come into the house, and back out,” says Parks, noting similarities in the plan to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion.

In the ensuing restoration, Parks guided the couple through the necessary upgrades, such as removing the aluminum wiring, rotting siding, and failing roof, and the preservation moves that would let the original design sing, from the site-gathered stone walls to the tongue-and-groove decking and the stairwell curtain wall.

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

About that stairwell surround: It’s lined with 64 custom wood-framed windows, and every pane of glass had to be replaced with a tempered panel in order to meet code. This required the window contractor to peel off the inner lining, replace the glass, put it all back, and refinish the wood to match the original hue.

“God bless the contractor,” says Parks. “It was a very laborious process. But we really wanted to keep the exact look, to get this beautiful, glowy quality of light at night, instead of using a modern coated commercial glass that would have a lot more reflectivity. We thought a lot about how to maintain the home’s magical qualities.”

After: Primary Suite

After: Powder Room

The group removed an ugly mudroom addition at the entry that “threw off the lines of the house and the facade,” says Chanel, to reveal the original front door and sidelites. Parks reworked the bathroom layout on the main floor, creating a dedicated primary en suite for the parents, and collapsing two side-by-side bathrooms into one split bathroom with a door between the powder room and shower.

Before: Stairwell

After: Stairwell

Parks enlarged the kitchen, and gave it a large, rounded banquette for a breakfast nook; its shape echoes a curving counter across from it. Chanel then adorned the back with scalloped slats. “I just thought it would be really cute to have a scallop detail there,” says Chanel of the built-in bench. “I was very concerned with making decisions that were too trendy, and this was one area where I was like, let’s just do something different.”

Before: Upstairs Bathroom

After: Guest Bathroom

While the lofty rear addition is quite different from the low-lying lines of the original structure, when it came time to design a second addition for an extra bedroom, the team opted to set it on the roof, to mirror the first volume and “complete the gesture,” says Parks. Now, everyone agrees it houses the best room in the house, belonging to one of the couple’s children, with windows looking into the trees. Parks points to the glow in the dark stars affixed to the ceiling beams as a favorite detail.

“It makes me happy to know that they’re enjoying the house. That’s my approach to sustainability,” says Parks. “Obviously, you have to make material decisions and there are technical components to it, but there’s also an emotional side, which is that we have to build buildings that people love and that will sustain them, so that they don’t get torn down.”

After: Children’s Bedroom

More Before & After stories:

A Hodgepodge Melbourne Home Is Reinvented From Top to Bottom

This Seattle Renovation Proves That Weird Can Be Wonderful

Memory Guided the Design of This Bauhaus-Style Budapest Flat

Project Credits:

Architecture: Scott Parks Studio / @scottparks.studio

Builder: Jerry Johnson

Structural Engineer: Fort Structures

Pool: Majestic Landscapes

Interior Design: Scott Parks Studio and Chanel Tarlo