The home’s hand-crafted features and nestled-in response to the site’s natural conditions were inspired by the Texas State Park structures built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and old stone buildings in Downtown Wimberley.
Enamored by the breathtaking landscapes of the Texas Hill Country, our clients knew they wanted to retire there. After securing a unique wooded property in Wimberley, they contacted us to design a home that would accommodate their desire to entertain family and friends.
The client’s desire to enjoy the Hill Country’s quiet beauty from inside the home informed our thinking and design intent to enable the home’s interior and exterior design to cohesively integrate with the site’s natural setting. Each room needed its distinct feel and to flow naturally into the outside areas. Because the home is large and required many rooms and features, this created some challenges for our team.
Our solution for the main interior rooms was to create a hierarchy of spaces with the family room as the focal point. Admired for its large masonry fireplace flanked by French doors, timber frame trusses, and a beautiful herringbone cathedral ceiling, the family room is the living, breathing heart of the home.
For visual connection and a seamless flow to surrounding spaces, the foyer, covered porch, kitchen, and game room are joined to the family room along a central axis and cross axis. Once we established the central spaces, we organized the remaining rooms and the garage wing to give a casual, rambling feel to the house.
For the exterior, we embedded the house into the sloping site first by cutting into the uphill side to create the motor court. We extended the exterior stone of the front of the house (the downhill side) to the ground to appear as a natural part of the hill. Then we created tapered stone buttresses at the low side to add the feeling that the stone is carrying the house’s load.
We clad the garage in cedar lap siding to give it a “lighter” appearance than the exterior stone on the main house, which helped reduce the garage’s apparent size. Also, we used a medium-dark stain to help make it feel smaller and blend in with the native surroundings. In the front of the property, we added a screened-in porch with views to the lake that you can access from the master suite, the pantry, and his office. It provides a most-loved private retreat for our clients within the house.
Interior Design: Amy Kennedy
Builder: Grady Burnette Builders
Photography: Andrea Calo Architectural Photographs