The Alta Vista Residence slips nonchalantly into Austin’s Travis Heights neighborhood and deftly situates itself at the edge of the Blunn Creek escarpment among several significant Live Oak trees. From the street, a delicate roof defines entry and carport, floating above a vertical-board-formed-concrete wall. This in turn protects the privacy of the interior while still engaging the neighborhood.
The house foregrounds a magnificent Live Oak. The visitor enters under its meandering limbs and crosses a modest bridge into a carefully choreographed sequence of spaces. Once inside, the interior opens resolutely to the out-of-doors and into the canopies of two more Live Oaks. 24.5’ of sliding panels disappear into an adjacent wall and open the main room, 10’ off the ground, into an incredible new private landscape. A 600sf ADU and an extra 1300sf below take advantage of the change in section (and Austin’s FAR exemptions), tucking unobtrusively into the hillside and opening onto the landscape behind, while a third-floor room secures the opportunity for long views beyond this private world.
Careful attention to detail is ubiquitous, and abstraction is utilized to focus attention on subtlety of light, material, and circumstance. Board-formed concrete is set against rift-sawn White Oak, which anchor the interiors against the ever-present tree canopies outside.
The Alta Vista Residence is situated in a pre-war neighborhood in central Austin where rising property values have encouraged a much higher density for its ~7000sf lots, engorging or replacing the original bungalows that once populated its tree-lined streets. In a sense, this design is also a counter-proposal to the immodesties of such urban transformation. Here, the existing disposition of the street is maintained, albeit with a new temperament – and the serenity of living in a private natural enclave is rediscovered in the midst of a bustling city.
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