“If you are able to construct an energy-efficient home that’s cost-effective also, why do you not take action?” Inquires Austin architect Stuart Sampley. After he started his practice five decades back, he saw a difference in the marketplace for young, creative professionals that wish to own clever, high-income houses without spending a fortune. “I do not [design this way] because it’s green — I do it because it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

The Austin Design Build Alliance, a nonprofit develop/design/build lab that looks for alternative means of providing sustainable, affordable home, contracted Sampley to build this residence in the city’s Bouldin neighborhood. They also ended up with a property that obtained a 5-star evaluation from Austin Energy’s Green Building Program, made an EPA WaterSense label for efficient water usage, and was featured on the 2011 AIA Homes Tour.

The home’s 1,900 square feet include four bedrooms, three full bathroomsplus a powder room and an outbuilding with a flex room that may be utilized as a guest bedroom, office or play space. The building materials are easy but hard-working: a corrugated Galvalume roof, that reflects light and resists rust; HardiePlank lap siding, a fiber-cement material that resists rust and holds paint well; and soffits and porches built of cypress, a wood that develops locally in swamps and is also quite rot-resistant.

Stuart Sampley Architect

Sampley had local metal artist Susan Wallace design the front door, then use a larger-scale drawback of its pattern to make an outside steel slider within the master suite’s doors.

Stuart Sampley Architect

The steel slider is one of the home’s most distinguishing creative components, providing a choice of solitude and creating artful routines of the light coming in during the day and seeping out at nighttime.

Stuart Sampley Architect

After the steel panel is open during the daytime, light floods the master bedroom through the expansive sliders; the master bathroom is via the door. Sampley utilized zero-VOC paint and carpets throughout the home.

Stuart Sampley Architect

“The DBA had a notion, but they didn’t have a lot yet,” Sampley says. So they went hunting with Sampley and discovered this one, which comprises three legacy trees — trees less than 24 inches in diameter and carefully shielded by the Austin Heritage Tree Foundation. Sampley loved the lot for this very reason. The final primary home’s L-shape neatly cradles this one between the master suite (on the right) along with the dwelling area (at left).

Stuart Sampley Architect

The honey shade of the cypress adds sunny warmth into the porch. Its abundant glow is achieved via a simple, nontoxic oil treatment. “When you look at the detailing of the home, it is modern — but somewhat darkened,” Sampley says. “It’s a traditional type, but all of the detailing is a reinterpretation of the traditional details.” At right, behind the tree, you may see the outbuilding which has the flex room and a complete bath.

Stuart Sampley Architect

Sampley is not sold on layouts where the kitchen, living and dining spaces are all a part of a big, open space. “If you want to stay in a loft, live in a loft,” he advises. To make a gentle division between the dining and living areas here, he wrapped a partial wall with walnut plywood. “Walnut and cypress have quite similar grain routines,” he says, drawing a connection between the home’s exterior wood features. The wall here distinguishes the two spaces without closing off them, and also supplies a surface that’s the right place to situate a hutch or sideboard or to hang art because most of the other walls have windows. The opposite side of the wall has built in amusement storage at the base, which makes it a convenient place to hang a flat-screen television. The floor is cork, which is quiet, resilient, easy to clean, soft underfoot and a sustainable material.

Stuart Sampley Architect

Sampley has observed that a lot of new houses have a propensity to overcompensate in the kitchen. “I wanted to make a small, streamlined, quite functional kitchen that still felt open,” he says. He noted that many prospective buyers and AIA-home-tour-goers who stepped into the 12-by-19-foot finished kitchen were surprised to discover that it is more than adequately spacious. Materials are easy: the countertops are Silestone, the cabinetry is painted wood under and pecan over (the “B” side of the plywood, he adds — because he preferred its rich color variants), and the appliances are Kitchenaid. Sampley says that the kitchen designer worked with laid out the kitchen meticulously, making certain there’s a practical location for every necessity.

Stuart Sampley Architect

The home’s practical, commercial-grade aluminum windows allow a lot of light into the clean, nicely laid-out living room. “There’s not really a project that’s too small for me,” Sampley says. “Over 75 percent of my job is substantial remodels, or complete remodels, right down into the studs. And a few new construction. But a lot of my new job is going back to look at these old forms and fashions and customs, and taking those as a starting point.”

Stuart Sampley Architect

Here’s the home’s entrance. Two bedrooms and a complete bathroom are tucked upstairs at the front part of the home.

Sampley keeps his jobs cost-efficient partially by staying involved from start to finish. “Architects who make a plan and hand it off to the builder may escape touch with how much things cost,” he says. He makes sure his customers know how much things should price, what the quality of the job ought to be and where it is logical to set the money. He then makes sure each stage of the project is well coordinated without long and costly lag intervals — for example, making certain paint colours are selected while the walls have been set up, and that the painter is there as soon as they are prepared.

Stuart Sampley Architect

After Sampley and the DBA discovered the land, it was occupied by a tiny, dilapidated home with a dirt floor. As they down it, Sampley was made to find ways to reuse materials, but most of these were unsalvageable. He had a notion for the structure’s widely rusted corrugated roof, however — whose reincarnation you may see in the left. They kept the metal sheets in a stack during the new home’s construction, and at the end framed them in wood to make a new privacy fence.

Stuart Sampley Architect

The home is near one of Austin’s historical Moonlight Towers — or Moontowers — 165-foot light towers erected around 1895 to light unpaved and underdeveloped regions of the expanding city. They were common all over the nation at that time, also Austin’s remaining 17, of a first 31, are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The window displayed here’s 11 feet off the floor of the master bathroom and is situated so that in darkness, the glow in the neighborhood’s Moontower supplies a nightlight in the bathroom. Sampley notes the window is east-facing, so it also lets in the glow of the sunrise.

To subtly distinguish the house’s two structures, he utilized board-and-batten siding on the outbuilding (at left), in contrast to the lap siding of the primary home.

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