Budget Breakdown: In Rural Texas, a Couple Build an Off-Grid Forever Home for $1.68M
Designed by Murray Legge Architecture, the courtyard house is topped with a jagged roof that harvests solar energy and directs rain to a giant cistern, where it’s filtered to become potable.
Designed by Murray Legge Architecture, the courtyard house is topped with a jagged roof that harvests solar energy and directs rain to a giant cistern, where it’s filtered to become potable.
Jonah Sutherlun and his wife, Lydia, are a testament to trusting the process. After moving to Temple, Texas, in 2010 for Lydia’s physician residency training, the couple lived in a historic home downtown for several years but agreed that they wanted more space once they started having kids. Jonah dreamed of an area with woods, or at least a patch of trees—a tall order in much of central Texas.
One concession the homeowners made to save money was downgrading the exterior retaining wall from a gabion design to native limestone blocks.
Photo by Leonid Furmansky
"We started looking for land pretty much everywhere," Jonah says, "but a forested one-to-three-acre plot is pretty hard to find in that area." As they expanded their search, the couple landed on Belton, a small town about 10 miles west of Temple and an hour away from Austin. "One night, we said, ‘Let’s just look one more time,’ so we went online and saw a listing posted 30 minutes prior. Someone had taken an old farm and divided it into lots, and one of them was very densely forested. We went and saw it the next morning and purchased it the same day."
The roof is bonderized steel, which gives it a matte gray color, and the siding is Kebony—a thermally modified wood.
Photo by Leonid Furmansky
In another cost-saving choice, the couple opted to finish the driveway in poured concrete instead of stone pavers. The roof is designed to collect rainwater, which travels through a set of pipes to a 39,000-gallon cistern behind the house.
Photo by Leonid Furmansky
See the full story on Dwell.com: Budget Breakdown: In Rural Texas, a Couple Build an Off-Grid Forever Home for $1.68M
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