How They Pulled It Off: A Self-Built Texas Farmhouse Designed Around the Views

I'm Jenna, this is my husband Oliver and we're in the home he built for us at Beamer Farm near Austin, Texas. So I grew up in Round Rock which is not too far from here and then I moved away and lived in bigger cities. I wanted to get back to more of that country living, slower life. Five years ago I happened to drive by the head of the property out here and it was this incredibly idyllic just little gem that had a for sale sign on the front of it and this is where we landed. It was a very interesting process because we had never bought property before and it was raw. There was no power, no water. And we said we're going to use this as an opportunity to get out to the property and we moved into a 34-foot camper trailer. That ended up being a five-year journey, the last two of which were building this place. It was a challenge and it was a huge learning experience. We used that time to figure out what was important to us. We didn't want to exceed the boundaries of what we learned that we needed. I knew the general guidelines around kind of what I wanted. The aesthetics were a little more abstract. I knew I wanted a very modern look. So working with Josh and Scott with Plural was amazing. We had a question, we were able to reach out to them. The collaboration and information that they fed back to us was invaluable. I think what Josh and Scott brought to the table in some of our early meetings were they knew where I was trying to go with it I think. The more meetings that we had and the more that we looked over space, ideas, some of the design elements, the more I trusted them in the process and the house ultimately became exactly what we wanted it to be. This is a home that's tied into a working farm where cut flowers and chickens are raised among a host of other things. One challenge for us with this house was that we knew that the homeowners would be building the home. We were thinking about that through the design process and how to make details and constructible elements that were clear for them. So I'm co-owner of Two Tailboards Custom Cabinetry. The millwork is the most creative portion of the house that I could directly influence. The flat panel, white oak, that's basically everywhere. It's all book matched, it's all grain matched, it's all sequential. It's a lot of intention and a lot of design went into it. I acted as general contractor, as labor, but building it myself with my business partner, framing and everything like that, installed all the windows. Part of a project like this is trying to keep it fairly simple. The first primary material would be Atlantic white cedar, so it forms the south wall of the home, wraps the two short sides. The second main material is the corrugated metal. It's the roofing material and it forms all of the north side wall. So this is truly a four-sided house insofar as you see the profile on the two short ends of the structure and then you obviously have the view side, the approach side, which that left us with a canvas that we could compose how we wanted to. The roof line follows the topography, so there's clearly a slope down to the low point of the site. That also happened to be southeast, which is the ideal orientation for sun access and for shading. How we start every project is we're asking a couple questions, particularly with a rural project, is where's the view? And so while we have these moments of large expanse, we also want to frame sort of special moments within a house. One at the entry for just a place to pause as you enter the home and then a second for the office at the end of the hallway to look out over that pasture. What I love about the house is every space is utilized. I wanted to be able to read by the window and have the light coming in and a place to store all my books. The double height windows allow tons of light into that space instead of feeling like a hallway at the end of a house. It feels like an office nook, like all the space you need. One of the baseline requirements when we built this place was we knew that we wanted to be able to sit in our living room and feel like we were outside. Every window in this place is a picture frame and all you have to do is get up and go stand by the counter and you've got five, six, or seven different views of a different part of the property and they're all beautiful. For this project we used Marvin Elevate windows and a Marvin Ultimate door here. We chose to stick with the standard sizes from the Elevate collection. In order to get these large configurations we used mole kits to assemble them together in the broader configurations. There's no element of the kitchen or otherwise that is touching the exterior wall and so the windows were a little bit freer to do whatever they wanted to. We love that Elevate windows are fiberglass clad wood windows which allows us to leave the warm pine exposed on the interior but have a suite of colors on the outside. It ties in very nicely to the cedar so they had that as a starting point to sort of build the material palette from. We want a place for family and friends to just come relax, enjoy nature. It's not worth having and this isn't worth having created if you can't share it.