Hallie Ferguson has been traveling to Fort Davis in West Texas since she was a little girl, when her geologist father would lead the family on a seven-hour drive from Austin to experience this picturesque landscape centered around the Davis Mountains. With its higher elevation (just under 5,000 feet), this is one of the coolest summertime spots in the state.

The town is named for historic Fort Davis, a U.S. Army frontier post established in 1854 that’s now a national historic site. Just a 20-minute drive away is Marfa, the artist enclave made famous by legendary minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. Classic movies have been filmed in this area, from 1956’s Giant (with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor) to 2007’s Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. With the McDonald Observatory nearby and a Dark Skies Initiative for the region, it’s is also an ideal spot for stargazing.

Hallie and her brothers had inherited their father’s local vacation house and shared it for decades. But when she saw a 1914 adobe home hit the market near picturesque Sleeping Lion Mountain, Hallie and her partner, Stuart, couldn’t pass it up.

After purchasing the property, the couple commissioned Stephen “Chick” Rabourn of Marfa’s Remote Architecture for a renovation and addition—and then at Rabourn’s recommendation she also brought on Austin firm Fox Fox Studio.

Adobe, Eaves, and Tile

Hallie: The house was built in 1914, and it was your typical four-room adobe. There was a small addition off the back, but it didn’t partake of its view, which is absolutely spectacular: of Sleeping Lion Mountain, and a wet-weather creek where you get wonderful wildlife: mule deer, javelinas. My intention was to strip the old original adobe down to its roots, update the kitchen, and then take off this not-attractive and not-useful addition and put a new addition on there.

Chick: I feel like the adobe was sort of an afterthought, because for me it felt like a Prairie-style house. Adobe is a Northern Mexico vernacular that came across the river here. To me, this is kind of an Anglicized adobe, with the big, broad eaves and the dormers, which you just don’t see in Northern Mexico.

Hallie: We decided we wanted to preserve the home’s tile floors, which were not original—we think they were added in the forties or fifties—they’re a beautiful 12-by-12-inch cement tile made with a black and white marbleized technique. We think they came from an old tile factory about three hours away in the Mexican town of Ojinaga, right across the Rio Grande.

Expanding the Project’s DNA

Chick: A builder friend from Austin called me and said, “I have this client. She’s the best client I’ve had in 10 years. You’re the only person I trust out there with her.” There was only one builder I wanted to work with, Kyle Melgaard at Method Building Company, and she had already called him.

My strength is the regional specificity of this area. I thought of Will [Fox, of Fox Fox Studio] because Will has a totally different kind of experience: He’s worked for Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi. And I really wanted to expand the DNA of the project, so we could run ideas off of each other. You could see the project could go in a sort of Fort Davis vernacular. You could almost see it too clearly—and I didn’t want to see it clearly.

Hallie: For this new addition, my intention was to have a gathering room with floor-to-ceiling windows, where you could sit and feel like you were outdoors. The old adobe home is located up on top of these rocks, which is unusual for this area, but probably because the creek sometimes floods. The house faces the mountain just barely sideways, so we wanted the addition to step down and twist to face Sleeping Lion head-on. I knew I wanted something with a modern or contemporary feel.

Will: With Marfa close by, we looked at some Donald Judd wall-based pieces and some structures he built in the area. We looked at Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio out in New Mexico: this modern-but-natural feeling, with this rhythm of the wood ceiling beams. We looked to Luis Barragán, with his simple forms and color. And because of the addition’s tilt, Louis Kahn’s Fisher House was in the realm of inspiration.

An Addition With A Twist

Will: The addition twists away from the original house to orient the view. It acts as an aperture. But we were also trying to respect the existing building. If you’re coming from the front of the house, the old addition really blocked the view—but by twisting and pulling it away, that view just opened up.

Chick: I kept trying to make the addition taller, and Will kept pushing it back down. We were trying to negotiate the eave of the existing house. It really wasn’t meant to block the view to the original house—that was really important to us.

Hallie: The genius, I thought, was we added a hallway between the original home and the addition. It has a pie shape, to connect with the addition at that slight angle. We have two long steps that lead down. Sometimes we’ll sit on the stairs because you have a good view. You’re sitting there with a cup of coffee, and then you look through the linear skylight right up above you. At night, I always stop and I look up through the skylight. I’m always hoping I’m gonna see a giant comet go shooting across.

Will: The new powder room originally came all the way to the wall, but when we realized it didn’t need to be that big, that created room for what we call the book nook, and a new window. This is honestly one of my favorite spaces in the house.

There’s also a secondary bathroom in the new addition where Chick and I wanted to take advantage of the rock-wall foundation from the old addition. We laid out the bathroom so that it works around it. For the shower space, it acts as a bench. It’s those unexpected moments that I think become really rich.

Adaptive Construction

Chick: The construction was very much affected by the site. We couldn’t get a concrete truck to the back, so we switched our foundation to pier and beam. We used AAC [autoclaved aerated concrete] panels for the floor system. They’re bigger than concrete blocks, but they’re light. They’re 90-percent air. They’re soft, so you can trench into them and run your utilities. The material has a really great insulative property—it’s sort of like the modern alternative to adobe.

We changed the original house as little as we could, but we wanted to make some additional arched openings. I worked with a structural engineering professor from New Mexico State University to make sure we didn’t hurt the original adobe walls, because they’re kind of sensitive.

Organic, Artistic Interiors

Hallie: With the new addition, I didn’t want any sheet rock. Even though it was going to be new and contemporary, I wanted to incorporate what could have possibly have been built at that time [in 1914]. We ended up doing a lime-plaster wall. It’s just beautiful: very organic feeling.

In my home in Austin, I do a lot of bright colors. But with this house I really wanted to stick to earth tones, and have the midcentury furniture that I love so much be a part of that experience.

I had inherited some Mexican art from grandparents and parents. And I always like to incorporate local things, so I added a pastel by Lanna Duncan, a good friend out there—she and her husband own the Paisano Hotel in Marfa. It’s of her husband’s great aunt in Fort Davis with her horse. I’m a lifelong equestrian.

After looking at tiles for the new addition, we decided on white oak flooring. In West Texas, there’s a lot of dust. I love a dark wood floor, but boy, it would show every little dust footprint. The white oak flooring really softens the lines and the feel of that new addition.

In the dining room, there was a preexisting skylight that we kept. In the new addition, we added a narrow skylight above the stairs. You never need to turn lights on during the day—every room is flooded with that wonderful West Texas light.

The Outside Inside

Hallie: I feel like these old homes have often just been added to over the decades, and to me the thrill is taking it back and making it more simple again, and showing the good bones. That’s what I think kept us in focus on this project. This past weekend our house guests fell in love with everything, but the thing that steals the show is the new addition, where every morning everyone was there drinking coffee. Everyone just gravitates to that, and you really feel like you’re outside, even when the doors are closed.

More Construction Diary stories:

In the Mojave Desert, a First-Time Builder Takes On a Tricky Prefab Home

At Sea Ranch, a Couple Build a “Forever Moving” Home

An Architect Sees the Potential in a Little Texas Home for His Growing Family

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Remote & Fox Fox Studio

Builder: Method Building Company

Structural Engineer: 13th Level Structural Engineers