Rural
A tight construction budget informed the choices Sean Guess made as he designed a house for a couple in Austin, Texas. Budget-minded materials, like the James Hardie fiber-cement siding, helped hold construction costs to $130 per square foot. Sherwin-Williams’s Cyberspace hue colors the exterior and Parakeet coats the custom kitchen cabinets by Austin Wood Works. The planter is made from Cor-Ten steel.
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Though Kordík knocked down a few walls to open up the space, much of
the architectural character comes from above and below. He exposed and cleaned the concrete ceiling to give the small flat a sense of unity and then installed
a finished oak floor as a textural counterpoint to
the craggy vaults overhead.
Shelf Help
The meat of the renovation focused on removing barriers, but Kordík did add a partition between the kitchen and the bathroom. The translucent glass wall does triple duty by delineating the space of the dining room, letting light into the bathroom, and backing bookshelves and culinary storage made from black film–faced plywood.
The designers fabricated everything in the house, down to the quarter-sawn pine and macrocarpa-wood kitchen cabinetry and concrete floor. “Physically the most challenging part of the build was wrestling an incredibly slippery concrete pump up the muddy driveway in the rain!” says designer Ben Mitchell-Anyon. The enamel pendant light is vintage. Photo by: Paul McCredie
Tasked with creating a multi-use guest pavilion on a relatively small Northern California vineyard lot that could also host sit down dinners for up to 60 people, designers at Anderson Architects started by asking the key questions: “Where should it be within the property?” “How much floor area do we need for a 60 person dinner?” “How much volume do we need for a basketball court?” “We also always tell ourselves to look at the landscape first, let it dominate and lead it through. The building took the form of a large Napa Valley barn.
"Key to the special nature of the pavilion’s purpose is that guests are immersed in the landscape and surrounded by the vines that produced the actual wine that they are tasting," Warner and McCabe say. We couldn't agree more. Head to quintessa.com to learn more about the winery and book a reservation to experience the pavilions firsthand.