Austin, Texas, USA

Alterstudio architects and Word + Carr Design Group landscape architects have created the Tarrytown Residence where design aims to inject a tone of modernity into an otherwise traditional, post-war neighborhood and one that defines a private landscape as the center of this family home.

Tarrytown Residence project was recently awarded the 2021 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

Caught between a walled garden along the street and a central courtyard behind, the interior opens resolutely to the out-of-doors under a ubiquitous ceiling plane and is minimally contained by custom site-glazed window walls.

A pair of abstract volumes, clad in long-format, black brick, and black-stained cedar completes the ensemble, shielding the interior from view and providing a buffer to the possibility of neighboring future development.

The visitor enters under a meandering limb from an adjacent Live Oak tree into a carefully choreographed sequence of spaces.

Here, great effort is made to simultaneously define discrete rooms while at the same time encouraging a strong sense of continuity throughout – where hints of what is to come are everywhere and surprising delights at the turn of a corner.

In the middle of the house, the unexpected monitor opens the center of the home to the sky, balancing the light in the interior and framing views into the tree canopy above.

To the east, a two-story library and similarly-scaled screen porch add a sense of verticality to this otherwise horizontally organized home, where a glass-floored bridge from an
office loft allows access to the upper bookshelves and transforms into a Juliet
balcony to the screen porch.

Inside, the black brick is presented against finely detailed millwork, mill-finished steel, and a rich palette of fabric, wallpaper, and colorful tile; this ensemble provides points of stasis against the omnipresent pull of the out-of-doors.

Taken together, these materials and the adjacent gardens create an environment rich in
texture and animated by sun and shade over the course of a day.

Project: Tarrytown Residence
Architects: Alterstudio Architecture LLP.
Design Team: Kevin Alter, Ernesto Cragnolino, Tim Whitehill, Joseph Boyle, Shelley McDavid, and Sara Mays
Client: Withheld
Contractor: CleanTag
Landscape Architects: Word + Carr Design Group
Photographers: Casey Dunn Photography