A well-worn truism about Texas is that everything is bigger here: trucks, hats, stars at night. But for Austin designer Kevin Alter, bigger does not always mean better.

For a house in a leafy, low-slung residential neighborhood, he and his team at Alterstudio looked instead to the classic Eichler homes of California for examples of living well rather than living big.

For Jim and Kristin Ramsey, new empty-nesters who relocated from Portland, Oregon, the house is just the right size. “After the youngest of our three kids went off to college, Jim was offered a job in Austin, and we thought it would be fun to try something different,” says Kristin. The couple were ready to trade in a surfeit of bedrooms for proximity to downtown restaurants and live music venues.

At first glance, the 2,500-square-foot structure, tucked between the gables of the neighboring houses, appears modest in scale, and in fact it cost less per square foot to build than the median in the neighborhood.

“It’s not overgrown,” says Jim. But it is full of surprising reveals, starting with the dining area cradled behind a curved wood wall at the entry, that make the one-story house feel spacious. Says Alter, “The wood pulls you through. There’s a kind of sequence of spaces, setting up expectations and discoveries along the way.”

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Alter and his partners, Tim Whitehill and Ernesto Cragnolino, have been investigating what Alter calls “the modern project” for years—“all that lovely stuff about openness and light and air”—while working with builder Richard White of Abode Homes to explore strategies to lower building costs. Eichler homes were points of reference for both their form—gracious, one-story plans incorporating outdoor space—and their construction.

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“There was a logic to all of it,” says Alter, from the framing system to the interior finishes. “Like, use a mahogany panel and you don’t have to paint it. We were looking at construction systems and asking, what can we do that’s smart?” In the end, he says, it came down to working with standard construction practices so as not to require specialized or highly skilled craftspeople.

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In other projects, Alterstudio has designed incredibly thin roofs, for example, that involve specialty steelwork and complex engineering. In this case, the team allowed the roof to be deep, accommodating both its structure and hidden downspouts.

Likewise, rather than detailing the stucco without expansion joints, as they often do, “here, we drew them in a way that makes sense with the house. Anybody can do stucco like this,” says Alter. By keeping overall building costs down, they could focus on a few big moves.

That approach worked for the Ramseys. Once they saw their first Alterstudio house, they knew they wanted to live in one. Jim, who describes himself as an architecture enthusiast, explains the appeal: Beyond the materials, the light, and the full-height windows, “each of the homes felt interesting and one-of-a-kind.”

In this case, the floor plan, essentially a U shape surrounding an interior courtyard, is made dynamic by the curving wood-wrapped forms at the front and rear of the house. Inside the entrance, the curve leads the eye toward a window in the dining room and away from a wing with two bedrooms and a bath.

The oak slats continue past the open kitchen, concealing the laundry and a cocoon-like powder room before giving way to floor-to-ceiling glass. The wood wall picks up again at the rear of the house, where it creates a textured backdrop for the living room and shelters the master suite. Finally, the wall curves around to define the family room before spilling out into the generous backyard.

The discovery of poetic possibility within practical constraints defines Alter-studio’s work. For example, a lightwell in an overhang casts ever-changing shadows against the front facade while at the same time reducing roof coverage in order to meet the city’s runoff-preventing impervious cover restrictions.

“Part of our job is to respond to site requirements,” says Alter. “I love it when those requirements result in something lovely.”

Project Credits:

Architecture: Alterstudio Architecture / @alterstudio

Construction: Abode Modern Homes / @abodehomes

Structural Engineering: Duffy Engineering

Landscape Design: Alemán Design Build / @alemandesign

Cabinetry Design: Signature Cabinets