she made the approach to the master bedroom contingent on crossing a bridge-like floor of clear, structural glass set atop a steel grid, which is visually open (harrowingly) to the entrance foyer below. Horizontally aligned slidingsash windows and high-set clerestory windows illuminate second-floor rooms while ensuring privacy. The big surprise of the Down and Up House is its “down” component: a 1,180-sf basement and terrace. Here Lantz inserted the mechanical room,
The approach to the master bedroom is contingent on crossing a bridge-like floor of clear, structural glass set atop a steel grid, which is visually open (harrowingly) to the entrance foyer below. a kitchenette/bar, a full bath, a generous seating area, and her husband’s wine storage. A subterranean patio containing a rolled-steel spiral stair to the first floor ensures that the basement is suffused with natural light. The space is also ceiled with suspended backlit panels of mica, giving it an intimate quality. Lantz used LED lighting throughout the house to reduce heat build-up inside. Lantz also designed the landscape setting of her house. Rather than a creating a lawn, she surfaced the ground plane with a mixture of light green gravel from Marble Falls. Bamboo lines the back fence, and plants requiring minimal watering punctuate the gravel plane between the front courtyard fence and the curb. Inside the front courtyard, Lantz inserted protected beds for growing edible plants, and a raised terrace, which opens off the living room and contains a small lap pool. A water collection system provides irrigation to plants in the courtyard.
28 Texas Architect
7/8 2013
As her own client, Lantz was able to pursue preoccupations that a more conventional architect-client relationship might have precluded. She sought to specify U.S.-made products to the maximum extent possible ( journalist Mimi Swartz chronicled her efforts in a feature article in The New York Times Magazine in October 2012 entitled “The (Almost) All-American Home,” an indication of Lantz’s partial success). As her own contractor, Lantz was also in a position to insist on a degree of constructional rigor and refinement that someone other than an architect might not value as highly. And as with the sustainable practices and technologies she incorporated, the experience of designing and building her own house enabled Lantz to teach herself about what it costs, financially and emotionally, to produce the kind of architecture that you hope your clients are willing to pay for. The paradox of exerting one’s self to achieve a certain standard of architectural precision and subtlety is that the final product, if successful, reflects none of the agony this entails. The Down and Up House instead is a serene and happy space, where the couple generously dispenses hospitality to friends, visiting architectural celebrities, and admiring members of art and design organizations. The clarity, simplicity, openness, and warmth of the Down and Up House dissolve anguish and struggle as effortlessly as the serrated ceiling dissolves noisy reverberation. It is left up to the glass floor to playfully impart an inkling of the turmoil that insisting on the integrity of an idea inexorably produces. Stephen Fox is a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas and a contributing editor of TA.