The Bellville Project

On a 700-acre site in the Texas Hill Country, The Bellville Project gathers two private residences and a shared clubhouse into a single communal ranch composition. Two families commissioned the scheme to balance retreat with regular entertaining: a place for each couple to live privately, and a shared building where everyone could come together.

The heart of the property is a 2,830 sq ft (263 sq m) pavilion. An exposed steel frame, likened by the architects to spider legs, supports a roof that appears to float, an effect produced by frameless clerestory windows running between roof and walls. Knotty Post Oak runs throughout the interior, giving the space a distinctly Texas character that reads as contemporary while drawing on traditional farmhouse cues.

The larger of the two residences sits roughly one mile from the central pavilion. A run of steel doors and windows opens to the landscape and frames the fireplace, where a stucco hearth and a stack bond firebrick course extend across the full length of the wall.

The smaller residence stands next to the property's original 150-year-old farmhouse. Designed to sit alongside the farmhouse vernacular, it takes liberties with material choice while keeping company with the adjacent bunkhouse and cookhouse. Outdoor rooms around both residences reinforce the indoor-outdoor relationship, and native meadows, plantings and vegetated swales tie the architecture back into the wider landscape.

Architect of record: Kevin Gallaugher, Dick Clark + Associates. Photographs by Dror Baldinger AIA.