When Austin, Texas, contractor Shiloh Hartman was asked to remodel an architect's personal home, he was apprehensive. “Often there is this thing between architects and builders,” Hartman says. “It would be a challenge for me working on an architect's house. That's their dream. It would be even more critical to get it right.”
But after Hartman, owner of Tallstar Construction, signed on to and finished the job, it turned out to be a highlight in his construction career. He got to work on a splendidly designed home featuring uncommon materials and colors that looked unusual on paper but which came together during the building process to become a handsome and captivating family home.
“At the end, I thought: ‘Wow, that was good,'” Hartman recalls, noting that helping the architect achieve his dream was “a really pleasant experience.”
And the architect certainly did his part: “He put his heart and soul into it,” Hartman says.
The house that Hartman remodeled started its life in 1952 as a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch in a modest Austin neighborhood. The house sat facing the wide end of a wedge-shaped corner lot, with a quiet street to the front and a busy thoroughfare to the side.
Although adding a second story would seem most logial, architect/owner Michael Antenora decided against it.
Credit: Paul Bardagjy
The house was purchased by architect Michael Antenora's wife, Sarah, several years before the couple married in 1999. After their first two daughters were born (a third was born nine months ago), the couple started looking for a larger home. When they discovered that everything they wanted was out of their price range, they decided to stay put and add on.
Although adding a second story would seem the most logical solution, Antenora decided against it for several reasons. First, the other houses in the neighborhood are single story, and he wanted to defer to that scale. Second, he wanted the house all on one floor to make it easier for children to get around. And finally, he thought that with a clever layout across the site, he could manage to block the noise and commotion of the busy street and create safe, sheltered courtyards where his children could play. (And he did.)
In fact, he dubbed his creation the “Courtyard House.”
The rectangular shape of the original house was maintained, while the newly added bedroom wing stretches back into the narrow part of the wedge-shaped lot with a breezeway connecting the two masses to create a “Z” shape. It is in the negative space of the Z that the two main courtyards exist. One is a “hard courtyard” lined with stone; the other is a “green courtyard,” the main play space for the children that is visible from the breakfast room, from the breezeway, and from a window-lined gallery (hallway) that connects the bedrooms.
Hartman is impressed with the appeal and functionality of the daylight-infused hallway, which has a slate floor and a ceiling made from mahogany plywood trimmed with batts to resemble panels. “That little hallway really works,” he says.
While the 2,500-square-foot project is distinctly a home, it bears some resemblance to Austin's Penn Field, a 300,000-square-foot, adaptive reuse project that Antenora's firm worked on several years prior. Penn Field was built during World War II by the U.S. Army as a training base, was then converted to industrial use, and later fell into disrepair. Antenora Architects transformed it into a stylish contemporary mixed-use center that includes a massive courtyard sheltered by translucent panels topping the skeletal frame of a deconstructed building.
The same theme is found in Antenora's Courtyard House, where two wood-and-bronze-painted-steel gates leading into the stone courtyard are faced with translucent panels that bring a glow to the courtyard during daylight hours, and that radiate light from the house toward the street during the nighttime. Antenora describes the gate as a large abstraction of a Japanese lantern.
Another theme from the Penn Field project — this time using stainless steel in an unusual way — is reflected in the house. At Penn Field, water from a courtyard fountain travels below ground level in a narrow stainless steel channel. At the Courtyard House, stainless steel is again used in an unexpected fashion, this time as the fascia on a round porch cover. So while the front of the house facing the quiet street retains its modest size and 1950s demeanor, it now has a touch of modern zest.
“What I like is that Michael is anything but conservative,” Hartman says, but he stresses that the house doesn't look odd. “It fits the lot; it fits the neighborhood.”
The variety of materials used for the house was both interesting and frustrating for the builder.
“Pushing the boundary is fun and exciting, but sometimes you want to scream and throw up your hands,” Hartman says. “It took a lot of head-scratching.”
A case in point: the different styles of James Hardie siding used on the project. The plans called for standard horizontal siding, a board-and-batten siding, and a shake-style board. “I didn't even know they made those,” Hartman says of the latter. Another unique application of Hardie siding board is horizontal lap siding with alternating wide and narrow pieces. It seemed odd to Hartman until Antenora showed him an old barn across town with the same look. Once the siding was applied to the architect's remodel, Hartman was won over. “It's incredibly attractive,” he says.
Although Hartman is now a fan of fiber cement siding, it took some time for this former carpenter to warm up to it. “When it first came out, I just hated it,” he admits. “It wasn't wood.” But as the quality of wood siding became progressively worse and the siding cracked and twisted more and more often, he came to prefer products like James Hardie siding. “It paints, it's straight, it's perfect, it seems like it will last forever,” he says. “I came around and I finally bought the Hardie shears.”