West Austin

A whole-house remodel that kept the bones and changed the identity, with a new ADU on the same site.

West Austin is a whole-house remodel of an existing home just west of downtown, paired with a newly built accessory dwelling unit on the same site. Ryan Street Architects designed the original house: plaster walls and ceilings, original beams, reclaimed wood floors, steel windows. The bones were exceptional. The remodel preserved them and gave the house a new identity through deliberate, specific moves for a young professional couple who knew how they wanted it to feel before they knew how to describe it.

The living room sets the tone. A ten-by-eight-foot puzzle painting by Tyler Hays, the artist behind BDDW, holds the primary wall. Across the room, a solar painting by Lita Albuquerque in pure pigment and gold leaf. An Anna Karlin chandelier hangs above a custom sofa by Egg Collective, built by hand in the studio's Brooklyn wood shop. In the dining room, under a vaulted ceiling with hewn beams, a Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert chandelier in handblown glass hangs above a table that seats ten. Wintrebert calls glass liquid light. The room reads that way after dark.

Below grade, unused storage became a speakeasy and a home theater. The design takes the 1920s as its source: dark wood paneling, saturated fabrics, aged brass, light that stays warm and dim. The speakeasy holds four to six people. The theater seats twelve. Both are sealed off from the daylight world upstairs. The accessory dwelling unit, designed by Joe Putman of Bioloom, holds a home office, guest quarters, a fitness room built to a professional athlete's standard, and a recovery room in chiseled limestone and cedar with two cold plunges and a ten-person sauna. Clint Carson of Tofka Construction built the project through completion. Featured in Tribeza, May 2026.

Read the full West Austin case study →