“And that’s real wood, not wrapped beams,” she said. The The living room’s 18-foot ceiling is crisscrossed with large wood decorative beams, she said, which give the room character. More house design: More | Flato designed this Texas Hill Country home for a retired couple downsizing in New Braunfels “I like making the colors of the art pop,” she said. In the living room, the neutral walls are trimmed with pieces from her art collection, mainly colorful abstracts and San Antonio artists including Bettie Ward, Ben Mata, Lucy Peveto and Eric Breish. In fact, the look is so appealing that she’s already using it for a backsplash on another home she’s building for clients who saw it while visiting her home. “It’s been treated with a sealant, so it will keep that nice, clean look,” she said. Urbano said she wanted the island to pop so much that she applied the same fireplace plaster instead of a traditional backsplash. In the adjacent kitchen, the focal point is the 3-foot-high center island with a quartzite waterfall rim swirled in charcoal grey, ash blue, green and taupe brown. The off-white material shows the trowel stripes, giving it a subtle depth. The living room is furnished with mid-century reproductions in rust, blue and neutral around a coffee table with flared legs and centered on a lime plaster gas fireplace rather than the more usual stone or brick as she wanted ‘something timeless’. I mean, you can have a 6,000-square-foot house, and if it’s not designed properly, it can feel very, very small. “This house is only 3800 square feet, but it feels a lot bigger.

“Of course, if you have large open spaces, the house doesn’t feel so small,” she explains. More house design: 3 sisters build an old house in Texas Hill Country with a huge kitchen It was a conscious design decision, Urbano said. To the left of the foyer is the main living area, entered through an exceptionally high and wide doorway that leads the mind to perceive the house as larger than it actually is.

These include limestone walls extending from the exterior of the house, 30-by-30-inch porcelain floor tiles that complement the limestone, an L-shaped staircase made with custom-stained white oak steps, black metal railings and glass balusters, and a wooden, tongue-and-groove ceiling. The house opens with a large two-storey hall that uses multiple materials to illustrate how they can be harmoniously combined. “But then I finally made a quartzite countertop to soften things up.” “There are elements here that are contemporary, like the Euro cabinets in the kitchen,” she said. The four-bedroom, 5 ½-bathroom home is built in the transitional style, a look she describes as “contemporary but not too modern,” with an interior infused with mid-century modern furnishings. She declined to disclose the cost of the house. But I could still build the house I wanted.”Ĭonstruction began in June 2020 and she moved into the house in May 2021.

“Two months later everyone started calling and we got really busy. “I thought, well, it’s going to be slow for a while, so maybe now’s the time to build,” she said. She bought a lot in 2015 in the Inverness neighborhood near Wurzbach Parkway and NW Military Highway, but other jobs kept her from starting the project. More house design: No kidding: Medina’s Goat Sheds house, made of five connected pods, is as quirky as its name “But I didn’t have time to build the kind of house I wanted for myself.” “It’s funny because people would always ask me, ‘Well, what does your house look like?’ ” she said. Urbano, 48, has been an architect for 20 years and has lived in several homes, but this was the first home she built for herself. “Any one of them could work in any home, depending on how you use it.” “I’ve added a lot of different things to the house so customers can see them in a real environment,” she said.

Plaster coffee table