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rchitect and educator Donna Kacmar has demonstrated how to do rather a lot with not very much in this tiny, 544-sf house. What’s more, unlike the grim experiments in bare-bones housing devised by modern architects in the heroic but stoic 1920s, Kacmar’s simple design uses a similarly minuscule bit of space but feels instead like a light-hearted garden folly where one is permanently on vacation. This “shed-for-living,” as architectural historian Stephen Fox dubs it in the third edition of The Houston Architectural Guide, plays upon the rusticity of its location to great effect. It was built in Garden Oaks, which was Houston’s first Federal Housing Administration-insured subdivision when it was inaugurated in 1937. Garden Oaks was planned according to federal standards with deliberately large lots, small houses, and winding streets lacking curbs and gutters. Although today there is an increasing number of tear-downs and entire blocks of original New-Deal-era houses are now gone, the block where this house is located still retains most of the original housing stock.
According to Kacmar, her client, Rick Russell, owned this nearly 20,000-sf lot for several years as it was both close to his business in nearby Oak Forest and to Garden Oaks Elementary where his grandchildren attend school. At the time he started working with Kacmar he was living in a downtown condominium but was frequently traveling to Austin to visit his future wife, Kathleen Smith. He was generally looking to simplify as retirement neared and initially considered living in an Airstream trailer already parked on the property. However, due to onerous city regulations regarding what exactly constitutes a “trailer park” in Houston, he found this route unfeasible. The architect and client devised a scheme for a house that incorporated key elements of the Airstream trailer experience: low cost, small size, and potential portability. They determined a theoretical budget of $100,000 by multiplying the years he had until retirement by the condominium association’s monthly fees — the idea being that this sum represented money he
1/2 2013
Texas Architect 31