Sugar Shack Residence
Architect: Alterstudio Architecture LLP
Location: Austin, Texas
Category: Up to $1.5 million in construction cost (category two)
The Sugar Shack Residence slips between a dramatic ravine and an intimate courtyard, both defining and accommodating its adjacent circumstances. Organized linearly, interior spaces negotiate between these two powerful conditions of landscape, and embrace their very different characteristics.
A Cedar-clad volume, treated in the traditional Japanese Shou Sugi Ban, is set perpendicular to the street and hovers above the landscape. The visitor enters in the middle of the house where an exterior, glass-enclosed stair penetrates the volume from a carport tucked into the hillside below. Windows direct one’s gaze strategically into the tree canopy or towards the private courtyard and align with the edges of the building, alternately sliding below the floor or above the ceiling.
Careful attention to detail is ubiquitous and abstraction is utilized to focus attention on the subtlety of light, material and circumstance. Here, mill-finished steel & board-formed concrete is set against purpose-made, fumed white oak cabinetry and floors.
