Ranch Lodge

The Lodge is the central structure of an extended family's multi-building retreat in Fayette County, Texas. The buildings are splayed across a hilltop and weave through a stand of mature live oaks to focus views and create numerous outdoor rooms with differing experiential qualities. The volume of the building is broken down into smaller, distinct masses that allow most interior rooms to have multi-directional views to both foreground gardens and the distant natural landscape. Exterior materials include wood timber porches and rafter tails, walls of rough limestone and cedar board & batten, roofs of wallaba wood shingles and galvalume standing seam, and a combination of steel and wood doors & windows.

Exterior materials frequently pass through the exterior walls and into the interior to imply the interconnection of formerly separate structures and to blur the distinction between interior & exterior. The relationships between interior spaces and their adjacent exterior spaces are just as intentional as between interior rooms. The scale, configuration, and materiality of interior spaces are deliberately varied to create contrast, experiential novelty, and spatial hierarchy. Interior materials included walls of rough limestone, plaster, and various painted & stained wood patterns, exposed timber ceilings, and floors of antique limestone and hand-scraped white oak.