DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
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34 DIGS.NET | 5 .1.2020 P R O F I L E | M A R K A S H B Y D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF CASEY DUNN AND CLAY GRIER (THIS PAGE) A R C H I T E C T U R E + D E S I G N C reating a home that seamlessly blends art, architecture, design and nature requires a strong creative vision, but also needs highly skilled individuals and teams to bring it to life. Located in the historic neighborhood of Alamo Heights in San Antonio, Texas, this modern house achieves that coveted blend. Designed for a couple, their two children and a coterie of animals, the project is the result of many players: builders Jeff Truax and Jim Truax of Truax Construction, Tobin Smith of Tobin Smith Architect, Mark Ashby Design, Christine Ten Eyck of Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, lighting expert Christina Brown of Studio Lumina, and art curator Alexis Armstrong of Armstrong Art Consulting. The owners—she a radiologist, art investor and nature lover; he a venture capitalist and former CEO of a publicly traded company—wanted their home centered around family and the surrounding landscape. To start was finding a solution for the architecturally challenging 3-acre site. "Conceived as a house of duality that addresses the differing conditions of public and private with a heavy, grounded stone wall facing the street and light, hovering volumes overlooking the ravine, Alamo Heights Treehouse is a home designed to be a peaceful escape focused on the natural realm within the conditions of an established neighborhood," says architect Smith. Comprising the living areas and bedrooms, the home's second floor is visible at street level, while the lower level, hidden in the hillside, is home to a game room, guest room, office and gym. "Three- dimensionally keyed into the site, the house is carefully situated around three mature oak trees, over a small valley and against two setback lines," Smith adds. "The living and dining great room is a bridge that straddles a ravine with a 36-foot-wide floor- to-ceiling operable glass façade. It's an extraordinary space to be in on a glorious day and during an intense thunderstorm. The bridge evolved from an early idea to put the most important room in the most dynamic place where the site conditions could be experienced and appreciated with the most intensity. A copper-clad mass perpendicular to the living room containing the bedrooms hovers over the glass-walled game room and pool deck below." Durable, natural materials sensitive to the regional context were used both inside and out. Selected to beautify over time, copper, stone, wood, plaster and glass play with light and the natural environment, and also "help define the materiality and textural intention of the home that gives an unusual