Hotlist

104 Austin Home Fall 2011

The hoT LisT

local experts choose what’s heating up austin’s design community this fall by d e v i n d i c k e y, a l e x i s m o s i e r a n d m i tc h e l l a l a n pa r k e r

When doing anything home and design related, this adage is key: When in doubt, call an expert.

Sadly, there are still wonky remodels and interior design disasters out there, done by those who refused to call a pro. So when compiling something so vast in scope as a complete design hot list for Austin, experts are necessary. This panel (see below) weighed in on nearly two-dozen local home and design categories, from the hot-test new architect to the neatest eco-friendly innovation. Call it a handy guide, or a road map to successful home projects. Just don’t forget to call for help.

pa n e l : Sally Fly, AIA Austin; Brooke M. Davis, Industrial Designers Society of America; Carolyn Williams, Travis County Master Gardeners Associa-tion; Jill Williams, American Society of Interior Designers; Kevin Alter, UT School of Architecture

Fall 2011 Austin Home 105

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Watch Your StepMid-century mod design is a downtown rarity. So the his-toric American National Bank and former Starr building has always been a beacon of cool. McKinney York architects preserved this retro look when they revamped the building for the McGarrah Jessee ad agency. When the space opened in 1954, it had the first escala-tors in town, attracting scores of onlookers. Today, the same space is turning heads. Inside what’s now called the McGar-rah Jessee building, the area has been spiffed up with a large wood-and-red-plastic-laminate tunnel-feature inspired by the mid-century work of designers like Eero Saarinen. The escala-tor leads to a lobby where gray Knoll womb-chairs mix with random primary-color ones. Downtown is hip again.

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RisingerRising

Matt Risinger, 39, describes himself as “an architect’s builder” for the way he and his company,

Risinger Homes, mix clean, modern lines with designers’ wood floors and rich fabrics for an Austin-centric contemporary look. He started building homes on the East Coast after gradu-ating college with a business degree but admits he was a bit naive. “I thought I was building the best houses in the world. I didn’t know there was anything besides production building,” says the Pittsburg native. “It wasn’t particularly interest-ing.” All that has changed with projects like a villa he recently “de-Tuscanized.” After all, he likes to keep things interesting.

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party on! For the entire month of October, more than a dozen organizations will join AIA Austin for a month-long celebration of design known as Austin X Design. The AIA Homes Tour on Oct.

1 and 2 will kick-off the series, which will also include the first ever ASID Interior Design Homes Tour on Oct. 8, as well as the Austin Museum of Art and Architecture Series at Laguna Gloria on Oct. 27.

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eco org gray marriage“Depending on the tone, gray can

be both cool and warm, and allows other colors like orange or

red to pop against it.”

–Aaron Kenny, Design Consultant for Skandinavia

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design coLor

WiSe WoRdWith a name like Mark Word, you’d hope your vocabulary was vast. Good thing the landscape designer can rattle off more names of plants with unpronounceable names than there are leaves on an Elaeagnus. Kidding aside, the longtime Austin go-to designer subscribes to a style called “New Wave” planting, but his flower-formula seems pretty sim-ple: “Choose a plant well, use a lot of it and add a little bit of surprise.” Word’s successful, busy design firm has scored him numerous top-billing clients in town, including It-girl hotelier Liz Lambert, with whom he collaborated on the iconic Hotel St. Cecilia outdoor spaces.

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Landscape designer

to the maxThe center for maximum

potential building systems is the world’s oldest ongoing operating nonprofit organization dedicated to green building and sustainable design. In the ’90s, it helped the city of Austin develop the world’s first green-building program. The Center is now crafting a building system for disaster relief in island

nations and one for Central Texas affordable housing.

tech chair, from nest modern


SmootH decoRAtoRAnne Suttles’ funky-cool decorating skills are in high demand around town. The 37-year-old Houston native created buzz when her self-designed Bouldin-area residence was featured on the 2010 AIA Homes Tour, which won her a merit award for design by AIA Austin. The former jewelry designer, land-scape designer and floral artist says she spends “a good three hours first thing every morning scouring hundreds of design blogs” for inspiration. Recently, Suttles and her husband purchased an old 1927 bungalow in Travis Heights that the couple gutted and rebuilt with their own personal flare. The hipster decorator has a close connection with all of her projects, saying, “It probably sounds a bit insane, but I like being a part of the entire home, inside and out.”

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suttles, left, uses simple, laid-back decor like ligne roset togo chairs in blue alcantara fabric and vintage hand-painted gasoline signs for a look that’s pure austin.


the social netWork Three years ago, Arthouse at the Jones Center would’ve been easy to miss. But since the historic building’s renovation by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects it’s become a place to see and be seen. The Rooftop Architec-ture Film Series, which monthly screens architec-ture-focused documentaries, has turned the space into a sky-high hotspot where designers go to rub elbows. Fall screenings include “Pomerol, Herzog & de Meuron” (Sept. 21) and “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?” (Oct. 26).

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carbon craze Europe is already hip to the trend,

but carbon fiber furniture is just now catching on here. The lightweight, eco-friendly material is a bit on the

expensive side, so it’s slowly gaining fans, but this bold, criss-cross-style

chair designed by Moooi is available at Scott + Cooner and through Threshold.

Stroke of Genius?

local architect Paul Lamb was tasked with modernizing the backyard space for an avid swimmer’s home overlooking

Lake Travis. The result has clearly made a splash. Lamb added a sleek 75-foot lap pool so the homeowner could take her twice-daily swims alongside nature, while an inge-nious curved-roof steel pavilion provides shade. The architect also wanted the style to be in tune with the rest of the house. “We didn’t want it to look like a foreign inter-vention,” says Lamb. So the Texas-industrial feel comes through in the space, where the homeowner now “enjoys nature, the weather, the breezes and takes ad-vantage of her wonderful property,” says Lamb.

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ouTdoor space

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fabric of our lives Nancy Mims, the bubbly textile designer behind Mod Green Pod, seems just as funky as her intricate designs. One minute she’s raving about wallpaper, the next she says she’s giving up the medium to focus on bed-ding. Soon after, she’s over bedding and is thinking of new ways to showcase her bright, pattern-crazy work. Mims launched her fabric brand in ’06 using organic cotton with her signature prints, which include flowers and butterflies. She gets inspired from pho-tos she snaps during morning walks through her neighborhood, and sketches new designs based on these images.

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Wine and design

it’s not surprising that the hottest restaurant design in town is the result of architect Michael Hsu and designer Joel Mozersky. The

longtime collaborators have left their mark on everything from Uchi to the Real World Austin house. For la condesa, floor-to-ceiling win-dows and an outdoor patio allow diners to “interact with the energy of the neighborhood,” says owner Jesse Herman. The space features a unique lighting element consisting of long cords that emerge from a central point in the ceiling, droop down, then go back up to vari-ous ceiling points before shooting straight down at varying lengths to attach to single light bulbs. The space won AIA’s Best Restaurant Design Award in 2009 with its cool blue staircase and colorful walls that recall modern art.

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get schooledDesigners Rob Stokes and Chris Rob-

bins’ new program, TeachDesign, kicked off at McCallum High School.

Students got the unique chance to help design their new Fine Arts Department,

for which students volunteered for weekly after-school classes to produce

“Bubbles,” a courtyard filled with cement, circular benches that light up

when approached by people.

mims creates fabric patterns

based on cell phone photos.

rob stokes of teachdesign

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diSASteR ReliefLocal Frog Design exec Michael McDaniel, 34, grew up in Mississippi, two hours from New Orleans, which meant Hurricane Katrina literally hit close to home. “These people who had lost everything were being herded onto buses like cattle, shipped over 350 miles out of state and stuck in a sports arena on cots,” he says. To him, that wasn’t good enough. Days later, he was drink-ing coffee when an idea struck him. He snapped on the plastic lid and turned the cup upside down, making his first model. His rapid response Reaction Housing System now includes stackable, easy-to-deploy, low-cost homes. “The modern day tepee,” he says. Inside, bunk beds fold down to sleep four people, and an adapter powers inside outlets for radios, phones and A/C units.

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house design

mcdaniel’s clever new reaction

housing system

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Home Boy

as a full-time project manager for local builders Risinger Homes, fresh-faced 39-year-old architect eric rauser

only has time to design one or two houses a year. Even so, his creative, simple structures are already the talk of the town. Take his Spring-dale Farmhouse, which was picked for this year’s AIA Homes Tour on Oct. 1-2. Rauser gives the organic urban farm a mix of comfort and modernity that’s true to its East Austin surroundings, where, it turns out, Rauser himself feels most at home. That’s where the busy hipster architect can be found rid-ing his bike, jamming out to band Phoenix on Pandora or chasing after his 3-year-old toddler, Gus. This laidback East Side vibe carries over into his designs, too. “The best architecture is when you take the designer out of it,” says Rauser. “Then you can’t see the ego of the designer in it.”

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rauser, on the steps of his rural-cool springdale Farm house, below left

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page turnerAndersson-Wise architecture fi rm

showcases seven of its most unique designs in natural houses, a coffee-

table look book of sorts with nearly 200 glossy pages of regionally appro-priate homes that stand out by fi tting

in. One Austin-area home featured is the Tower House, a three-story

wooden structure that rises above its tree-fi lled surroundings to peek out

onto Lake Travis. The residences range in size and region, but each refl ect the

architects’ focus on enhancing the landscape, not competing with it.

diRtY deSiGNThe idea is shockingly simple. Larry Williamson has invented a machine that turns dirt into 10-foot bricks that can be stacked together to build a house at twice the speed and half the cost of conventional wood-and-con-crete structures. “We’re making giant Lincoln logs except we’re doing it with dirt,” he says.

His company, EarthCo Megablock, is completely changing the way we think about home building. Imagine this: If you’re putting in a normal-size swim-ming pool on your property, you could take that removed dirt, feed it into Wil-liamson’s machine, which mixes in water and compresses the dirt into enough logs, and build a 2,000-square-foot house that’s almost indestructible. “Dirt can’t burn or rot, insects can’t eat it, it doesn’t mold and it lasts 1,000 years,” says the Ranger, Texas-based company’s founder, adding that it’s like living in an above-ground wine cellar, which saves on heating and cooling costs. “We’re breaking the rules,” Williamson says.

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garden Trend

Face it: Lush, sprawling green lawns here aren’t exactly eco friendly. Residents are taking note, opting for water-

wise gardening alternatives that use various cacti, agaves and aloes as the go-to landscaping choice.

These plants can go years without supplementary water. (For more, see “Spike It,” page 126).

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crossing over

if anyone thinks Austin isn’t crazy about modern design, one need only look in the

window of downtown’s threshold Furniture & design studio at the life-size, black horse light feature by Moooi. “We thought, ‘We’ll never sell it because it’s an $8,000 lamp,’” says managing director Emily Hoelscher. “We’re on our third one now.” Other catchy pieces by Moroso and Kettal fi ll the rest of the store. “De-sign should be fun,” she adds. “People take it way too seriously sometimes.”

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Landscaping pLanT

Thriving in hot temps on small amounts of water, and still able to look good amid

landscaping, native agave has become de rigueur to locals who fi nd the thick, tentacle-like leaves add edge to their

gardens—and keep deer out.

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bold bouldin Why is a tiny piece of 78704 becoming the go-to ’hood for contemporary design lovers? Easy. Land value is high. The location rocks. And pesky CC&R real estate regulations are virtually non-existent. The lack of these

regulations (called covenants, conditions and restrictions—which dictate, for example, what percentage of stucco can be visible on an exterior), allow for talented,

progressive architects to get funky with their designs.

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design ’hood

So RAdRyan Anderson’s RAD furniture company hasn’t seen its second year pass yet, but his colorful, bluntly designed pieces have al-ready made the handsome 32-year-old a designer to watch. He learned to weld in the UT graduate archi-tecture program and soon began toying with his own designs. His line includes simple tables, benches and two-legged stools made of steel and wood, that he says, “let the materials be what they are, and not try to make them look like something they aren’t.”

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furniTure designer

anderson, top, and his two-legged

barbara stools

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