A Svelte Austin Home Enables Cleverly Compact Living

When husband-and-wife architects Ernesto Cragnolino and Krista Whitson renovated their previous home—a condo in a landmarked Austin building designed by modernist Harwell Hamilton Harris—they "bickered constantly," as they tell it. 

So when necessity pushed them to leave that home in order to build something that would accommodate their growing family, there was some concern that their working relationship would be rocky.

"But this was super smooth," says the couple. "It was like working with our partners at our firms." 

And that’s saying something when you consider the unique challenges this project presented from the get-go, and the fact that they were on a strict budget. The home is located on a double-wide lot (directly behind their old apartment) that they purchased in fall 2014 with another couple for $520,000. They had to go through a lengthy review process to demolish the existing home, which had been used as student housing for the nearby University of Texas at Austin, and then apply for a variance to be able to subdivide the lot so each couple could build their own home.

The couples flipped a coin to determine who got which half of the lot. Ernesto, a partner at Alterstudio, and Krista, an associate at Mell Lawrence Architects, lucked out, winning the plot they wanted most: the shady northern half, which has mature trees and more room for a yard.

It wasn’t until early 2016 that they were finally able to start the design process. Their goals were seemingly simple: a compact design with four bedrooms (a parents' room, plus one for each of their children) built with a budget of $500,000.

"We were very sensitive to cost, and we wanted a very small house, as small as it could be," says Ernesto. "We didn’t want to end up with rooms we were dissatisfied with."

Once they took into consideration the parking requirements and the critical root zone for the trees, they realized that there was only one shape the house could take: a pair of stacked boxes, with the upper level slightly larger than the ground floor.

"We have never been so constrained with what could go on one lot," they say. "We hate it when architecture is a consequence of forces outside of it, but it meant that the house had to be very agile and responsive."

The narrowness of the lot led to the ground floor having a shotgun-like set up, with one room leading into the next. But in order to make the entry of the 1,922-square-foot home more gracious "than just entering into a kitchen," they constructed a thin wall with the same steel used on the exterior to create a small hallway.