When husband-and-wife architects Ernesto Cragnolino and Krista Whitson renovated their previous home—a condo in a landmarked Austin building designed by modernist Harwell Hamilton Harris—they “bickered constantly,” as they tell it.

So when necessity pushed them to leave that home in order to build something that would accommodate their growing family, there was some concern that their working relationship would be rocky.

“But this was super smooth,” says the couple. “It was like working with our partners at our firms.”

And that’s saying something when you consider the unique challenges this project presented from the get-go, and the fact that they were on a strict budget. The home is located on a double-wide lot (directly behind their old apartment) that they purchased in fall 2014 with another couple for $520,000. They had to go through a lengthy review process to demolish the existing home, which had been used as student housing for the nearby University of Texas at Austin, and then apply for a variance to be able to subdivide the lot so each couple could build their own home.

The couples flipped a coin to determine who got which half of the lot. Ernesto, a partner at Alterstudio, and Krista, an associate at Mell Lawrence Architects, lucked out, winning the plot they wanted most: the shady northern half, which has mature trees and more room for a yard.

It wasn’t until early 2016 that they were finally able to start the design process. Their goals were seemingly simple: a compact design with four bedrooms (a parents' room, plus one for each of their children) built with a budget of $500,000. “We were very sensitive to cost, and we wanted a very small house, as small as it could be,” says Ernesto. “We didn’t want to end up with rooms we were dissatisfied with.”

Once they took into consideration the parking requirements and the critical root zone for the trees, they realized that there was only one shape the house could take: a pair of stacked boxes, with the upper level slightly larger than the ground floor.

“We have never been so constrained with what could go on one lot,” they say. “We hate it when architecture is a consequence of forces outside of it, but it meant that the house had to be very agile and responsive.”

The narrowness of the lot led to the ground floor having a shotgun-like set up, with one room leading into the next. But in order to make the entry of the 1,922-square-foot home more gracious “than just entering into a kitchen,” they constructed a thin wall with the same steel used on the exterior to create a small hallway.

It allows a shallow shelf in the kitchen for pantry items, and gives a view through the dining and living rooms to the backyard. “There’s a sequence of spaces that invite you to explore further,” says the couple.

The first thing you see is the dining room, which has a built-in table and bench made of white oak. A wooden screen separates the dining space from the living room, which leads out to the yard.

“It was very important to us to have a sense of spatial division, so those rooms could have their own character,” they say. While there are no interior walls on the first floor, it doesn’t feel like “an amorphous great room.”

Because of the mature trees, the ground floor gets less natural light, but the designers saw this as an opportunity to “embrace the nuance you get with that kind of dappled lighting” and chose materials like white oak and mill-finished steel that would work with the light to give each room a more tactile quality.

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The black steel panels used inside are the same that wrap the exterior of the lower level. “It’s rough and tough enough to be outside, but when it comes inside, it’s finished enough to be used in the most delicate of ways, like to trim cabinetry or make handles,” say the architects.

The upper level is an efficient row of bedrooms with two unfussy bathrooms. To make these spaces feel less conventional, the bedrooms feature frameless windows that extend beyond the floor and ceiling. From the outside, it lends the top floor a kind of "mysterious quality,” while inside the rooms are visually opened up, says the couple. “It feels like they are slipping out into the exterior.”

While those windows were one of the more expensive choices in the project, the couple kept costs low in a variety of ways. They used industrial-grade steel bar grates for the air vent grills instead of the costlier architectural aluminum grating. Ikea cabinetry was installed throughout the home, too. Most importantly, they worked with a cost-conscious builder. “He’s the kind of person that worries about your money like he worries about his own,” says the couple.

“This is the cheapest house either of our offices have ever worked on,” they say. Landscaping and a solar panel array that allows the house to be net zero pushed them slightly over budget, putting the final cost of construction at $550,000.

Overall, the couple says the process was “super fun and easy going. We made much better choices on account of working together.” It wasn’t until the end that their collaboration started to falter. “Funny enough,” they laugh, “when we had to make stupid decisions like where to put towel bars, we degenerated to our old ways.”

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Project Credits:

Architect: Ernesto Cragnolino, FAIA, Alterstudio Architecture and Krista Whitson, AIA, Mell Lawrence Architects

Builder: Green Places, Inc.

Structural Engineer: Duffy Engineering, Inc

Civil Engineer: Kurt Prossner, PE

Landscape Design: Word + Carr Design Group