What Home Will Attract a Buyer That Has Owned Architecturally Significant Homes Across the Country
Recently, I was confronted with a tall task. A buyer with a history of owning spectacular modern homes across the country—homes that had been published in Architectural Digest and discussed at architectural lectures—asked me to find an architecturally significant modern home to purchase in Preston Hollow.
My clients engage me for many reasons, but one is that they know I understand they want a home that provides more than satisfying statistical requirements and desired amenities.
However, not every client has previously owned homes that have been published, celebrated, and discussed at architectural lectures. Here was a buyer with exquisite taste and a discerning eye, and I knew every home would be compared with their previous homes of national recognition.
I successfully found them an architecturally dramatic and aesthetically compelling modern home designed by architect David Stocker, with the interior by Colleen Waguespack.
Why Site Comes Before Architecture
What I find most interesting is that it was not only the raw appeal of the architecture that created the motivating attraction to the home. It was also how the architecture related to and responded to the site.
I often help my friends and clients find architecturally significant homes, but as a real estate broker, I always suggest looking first for the best site and then, secondarily, for the best home. A home can always be modified or enhanced. A spectacular home on a beautiful site almost always ensures that one will be happy living in the home one has purchased. Ultimately, that is the priority—a home that will make one happy.
The site determines how you live in and enjoy the home—views, sunlight, nature, neighbors, privacy, or vibrancy. Architecture can enhance these qualities but cannot create them where they do not exist.
How This Modern Home Responds to Its Site
Sunlight, space, and sightlines are elements that form the foundation of a home. Materially expressive, meticulously crafted, and meaningfully designed architecture makes a home memorable.
The buyer immediately had a positive impression of this modern home as sunlight poured in, illuminating connected and staggered spaces. This invited them to look through the home to the rear terraces, pool, garden, and lake.
The Texas modern indigenous materials reinforced the relationship between the home and its site. Stone, wood, glass, and steel were selected not just for their appearance, but to connect and transition the home from its interior to the decks, terraces, pool, lawn, garden, and lake.
A Modern Home Beyond Architecture
I do think of architecture as art, but not like art in a museum, roped off and untouchable. A home should be instinctively inviting to live in and use.
One of my favorite images of this home is a photograph the buyer sent me of his family and neighbors fishing for largemouth bass along the linear lake that frames the lot.
The Memories That Make a Home
Yes, this is a modern home where the rear terraces, porches, pool, lawn, and lake create an environment that invites one to participate in one of the oldest and most traditional forms of entertainment—fishing.
Ultimately, one loves a home for the memories it creates and the memories it offers to create in the future.
Discuss Representation of an Architecturally Significant Home with Douglas Newby
