Westbrook Residence Reimagines Suburban Austin Living
Westbrook Residence settles into a post-war suburb of Austin, United States, where Alterstudio Architecture rethinks how a contemporary house might share ground with its neighbors. The 3,494-square-foot home holds to the neighborhood’s low profile while trading excess floor area for generous gardens, creating a calm, single-level setting for a family intent on aging in place. Rooms gather around planted courts so daily life tracks the arc of the sun and seasons.
From the street, a low limestone profile holds the property line, quiet against the rise of taller replacements around it. Behind that modest front, rooms and planted courts interlock so that thresholds unfold gradually, bringing inhabitants from sidewalk to garden in a few measured steps.
The house is a single-level residence in Austin by Alterstudio Architecture, set within a once-modest subdivision now under pressure to build bigger. Instead of maximizing floor area, the project trades volume for garden, arranging daily life around planted edges and open courts. Program, circulation, and material all work toward a way of living where family members move between enclosed rooms and outdoor rooms as easily as crossing a hall.
Masonry Volumes And Light
Four masonry volumes anchor the plan, each built in limestone brick with precise steel-framed openings. These heavier elements hold the more private rooms, giving bedrooms and other intimate areas a sense of enclosure and calm. Between them, a central living area stretches under a continuous ceiling, held by floor-to-ceiling, site-glazed windows that dissolve the edge between interior and garden. Above this in-between zone, a steel-clad upper volume contains light chimneys that pull daylight deep into the house, turning the main living room into a softly lit hub throughout the day.
Living Between Rooms And Gardens
Public areas sit not inside the masonry, but in the interstitial territory between the four volumes, so movement from one activity to another passes along glass and landscape. This layout creates a free-flowing shared realm that holds kitchen, dining, and lounge functions while still reading as a coherent whole. Intimate rooms remain distinct inside the masonry blocks, yet doors and views always lead back toward the central living area and the encircling gardens. Family life slides between a more pre-modern sequence of discrete rooms and a modern, open zone where conversation and views run unbroken.
Encircled By Garden Rooms
Rather than one rear yard, the house is wrapped by several gardens that register as outdoor counterparts to interior rooms. Each side of the plan meets a different planted condition, so a walk around the perimeter reads as a slow rotation through varied green outlooks. Large panes of glass sit close to planting, drawing foliage, light, and shadow into everyday routines at the dining table, along corridors, and beside places to sit. The reduced floor area ratio keeps building mass low enough that garden remains the dominant presence across the property, even as the neighborhood densifies around it.
Single-Level Life Over Time
Organizing the entire program on one floor allows the house to support aging in place without sacrificing connection to the city. Bedrooms, bathing rooms, kitchen, and shared areas all sit on a continuous level, so daily routines can adjust as mobility and family composition change. Proximity to neighbors and urban amenities stays intact, yet the house still holds a buffer of greenery between the street and interior life. In this balance of garden and built form, the residence suggests a quieter path forward for suburban redevelopment, one grounded in everyday use rather than excess size.
As light slips down the chimneys and across the limestone at day’s end, the low-slung profile again recedes into the quiet street grid. Inside, rooms and gardens remain closely paired, keeping that alternative model for suburban living grounded in simple, repeatable moves.
Photography by Casey Dunn
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