Like many couples with a growing family, Bhavani Singal and her husband found that with the birth of their second child, they suddenly needed more space. “It was right about that time that Covid-19 was becoming a pandemic,” says Bhavani, founder of Austin-based architecture firm Workshop No. 5. “Friends of ours, five minutes from our home, were going to put their house on the market, and it was one of those things that just kept hitting me.”

Bhavani and her husband went to look at the house—a modest, one-story brick residence nestled in between several large, heritage oak trees—and saw potential. “They were so generous,” Bhavani says of their friends. “They could have gotten more money for the land,” but they liked the idea of people they were close to stewarding the house.

After closing on the property, Bhavani drew up plans to adapt it into a 3,500-square-foot home for her family of four, which includes two sons, ages 9 and 11, plus their pit bull mix, Lollipop. As the pandemic picked up, her parents and a sibling in India all contracted the virus. Luckily, they recovered, but the scare prompted Bhavani and her siblings in the United States to move their parents to Austin, where they announced they had chosen to live with the architect and her family. “We were like, okay, good to know,” Bhavani says with a laugh. “And we quickly added another thousand square feet!”

Working around the oak tree in the front yard (Austin has strict codes around building near trees with certain trunk diameters, which denote age), and maintaining the footprint of the original house, Bhavani designed a contemporary, two-story addition that houses the primary suite and the boys’ bedrooms and playroom, while the one-story volume, which includes preserved and rebuilt elements of the original house, hosts the public spaces—the kitchen, living rooms, offices, and dining area—as well as her parents’ suite. Adapted for her mother’s walker, with wide hallways and easy-to-reach shelving and drawers, this public zone is the home’s social hub. A flexible-use ADU in the backyard, where a large lap pool is a weekend hangout, is meant for overnight guests or for short-term rental, and Bhavani sees it as a future clubhouse for her boys and their friends as they enter their teen years.

“It’s designed for three generations,” Bhavani says of the house. “It’s how my parents liked to live in India, how my husband and I and our children want to live now, and as they go through life and get older, we wanted to make it feel like we’re all living together, but not always in each other’s zones.” Read on to learn how the project unfolded.

This Old Oak

Bhavani: We have a 160-year-old live oak tree in the front yard. It’s such a majestic tree and we didn’t want to disrupt it, so we kept the front wall of the existing house and the foundation, then added on in the back. I would say it was close to new construction, but we kept a lot of the bones. During construction, we realized that the original brick wall was just being held up by gravity, so we had to pull it down and redo the whole thing.

Nostalgic Materials

A lot of the materials were driven by my childhood in India, like the red brick—terra-cotta clay work is very big in Northern India, where we’re from. The terrazzo, that’s another thing that’s pretty common there. In my childhood home that my dad built when I was growing up, I saw the laborers take all the scraps from all the marble that was around the house, and just throw it in the floor and polish it. That meant a lot to have that in the house—just feeling connected to the ground, for my husband, was a big thing. At first we started with a sheetrock fireplace, and then we were like, no, we really want something that makes us feel connected to the earth. The clay tile fireplace really helped tie what my husband was looking for to my connection to India.

Aging in Place

My mom and dad are in their eighties, so mobility is a problem. We made sure that everything was wide enough so that one of us could be next to them if needed to get around the house. They’re still mobile, but my mom has a walker that she takes into the shower, so we chose to leave it open in their bathroom so that it’s easy for her to move in and out. It’s also oversized so that two people can be in there to assist with bathing.

They visited enough before I started designing, so I knew their physical needs. They also had their way of life in India—the layout of the home in India is very similar in configuration, which was intentionally done so that the patterns they’re familiar with weren't disrupted.

Command Central

My dad likes being in that central space, the little nook under the stairs, because he can see the front door and the kitchen—he’s like “this is a great spot!”

Kitchen, Hub of the House

My mom, she is a beautiful cook. When she cooks, she can do everything by sense of smell. She can sit next to me and, by smell, tell me everything I’m doing wrong! We love cooking, and usually there are three people in the kitchen at the same time, so with the island, we were trying to space it wide enough, so it didn’t feel crowded or like you were in each other’s way. Even small details were considered and thought out, and that has made a huge difference. All the drawers are below the counter, so my mom can open them, and there’s open shelving above, so she can see what’s up there.

Save and Splurge

One splurge was the combed Alaskan yellow pine wood in the entryway and the backyard [used to enclose the porch and patio]. For the rest of the house, we used very basic materials. Even the fascia is Hardie and not metal. Our second splurge item is the perforated metal staircase handrail that you can see through.

For the island, we were really just trying to have fun with it using cost-saving measures. I went to a slab yard and saw this slab, which cost $1,500 versus one my husband wanted, which was $4,000. The counter is leathered granite, which looks like quartzite, and for a layer of fun we added some curves.

Dream Team

This was all done for under $300 a square foot—and it was done when Covid was causing inflation, and the prices of everything were just sky-high. A lot of the house was deconstructed—it wasn’t demoed, it was taken apart stud by stud. The construction crew pulled nails out of each stud so that we could save on lumber—and each stud was reused in the house, which is a big deal now that I think about it. We kept the same budget and we grew 1,000 square feet, and we were able to retain a lot of the big features of the house. That doesn’t happen without a great design and build team.

More Construction Diary stories:

They Built Their Serene Mérida Home Without Felling a Single Tree

How a Tucson Couple Built a $100K ADU—and How You Can, Too

How Japanese Minka Homes Inspired a Designer’s Coastal Cabin in Maine

Project Credits:

Architect: Workshop No. 5 / @workshopno5

Builder/General Contractor: Streamline General Contractors / @streamlinegcllc

Structural Engineer: Arch Consulting Engineers

Cabinetry Design: Campbell & Sons Custom Carpentry

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Construction Diary: How an Austin Architect Rebuilt Her Brick House for Three Generations of Family