I can feel her eyes rolling from here to see this on my website. But it’s one sentence of many that I cherish from the experience of designing a house for my parents. They helped me be a better professional, when being their rambunctious architect daughter wasn’t appropriate. My mom’s words were important then, and they resonate with me still.

"We’re looking at land in the Texas Hill Country."

And there’s another sentence that I still remember. Although it came a few years earlier.

All of my people are from North Carolina and Virginia. When I decided to come to graduate school in Austin, Texas, it never occurred to me that I might still be here, over 15 years later. Or that my parents would decide, in the summer of 2001, to buy that land, hire me to design their new house, and move here to live.

It’s not uncommon for one of the first projects for a young architect to be a house for their parents. Throw aside your ideas about not working for friends and family. Working on my parents’ house was one of the best experiences of my life. Building little models and sending them off in the mail. Design meetings in my home office, drawings taped to the walls. Working through my dad’s spreadsheets confirming that there is enough rain in this part of Texas to live off rainwater alone. Picking lights and hardware with my mom, checking the framing dimensions on site with my sister, painting the bedrooms ourselves, to save on the painting costs. Watching walls go up that would one day shelter the many and varied activities of our extended family.

The house is divided into two wings that form an "L" around a buffalo grass lawn. You enter into a screened breezeway with the main public spaces of the house on one side and the bedrooms on the other. This breezeway is one of the favorite things for all of us about the house. Every day, multiple times a day, you experience what it’s like outside, as you move from one wing to the other. The space is almost always actually breezy, and frames the view to the north of a large live oak grove and the hills beyond. It also completely separates the happy noisiness of the great room and kitchen from the bedrooms.

The house is oriented to catch the breeze and the sun. In the winter, sunlight spills into the gallery hall in the bedroom wing, heating up the concrete floors. In the summer, that same concrete is cool to the foot. Carefully placed windows and good connection to porches and outdoor spaces make a relatively small conditioned space (2,200 sf) feel much bigger. All of the rainwater that falls on the house and carport is collected into two 10,000 gallon cisterns. This system provides all the drinking and household water.

The house is fundamentally connected to the local climate, and so too are my parents. The awareness of this connection is, for them, a positive one, and I would argue a transformative one. And I am very happy to have been a part of it all.