Inside This Architect s Self Designed Urban Sanctuary Huckberry Homes

I think a home has to be almost everything now. Now the home has to have connection with nature, a sense of wellness and being, sense of belonging. People work at home now. So the home very quickly had to become everything. That's what people tell us when they come in now. I want it to do all of these things for me so I can stay at home and be happy and not feel like I have to go somewhere else to go get those things. Here at Huckberry, we believe your home is more than just a place to live. It's a reflection of your style, your passions, and the stories of adventures along the way. Join us as we step inside the inspiring spaces of our community that truly embody what it means to live well. This is Huckberry Homes. My name is Michael Hsu. I'm an architect and interior designer here in Austin, Texas, and the neighborhood that we are living in is called Clarksville. A lot of architects really invest in their home, but they rarely will build a ground-up house because it just is safer to keep remodeling and adding on and maybe start with something sort of old. To me, it was super exciting. I wanted to think about this, not myself as a client, but in a way like the neighborhood in Austin as a client. Like what do we do with these 50-foot wide lots to where we can live in the way that we want to now, but really to live in every square inch of a compact city lot because this is a sustainable sort of lifestyle. Welcome to my home. We're in Clarksville in Austin, Texas. It's symmetrical down the middle, but it's clearly serving two different purposes. The glassy box is the living area, the public space, and this is the sort of bedroom wing designed to where the front yard becomes like another outdoor living space. So we spend a lot of time out here. In So it would be a little bit permeable. I think it's always nice when you can get glimpses into someone's sort of wall, but not block it off entirely, which seems really unfriendly. And it has this unusual sloped gable. There's literally only a handful of buildings that have a similar roof. One is in Australia. And then the landscape is meant to be super low maintenance, and it allows the plant material to sort of bleed into the living areas and even into the car areas. So there's not a real boundary between where a car goes, where you're supposed to sit. It feels like just a more efficient use of, you know, this outdoor space. So the house has a symmetrical facade, but each half is trying to communicate something really different. This is about a very open, generous sort of neighborhood facing sort of space. The houses generally in these types of neighborhoods, the insides feel kind of dark. So this was intentionally meant to be very light. This is a brick that was one of the few very special things that traveled a great distance. This is from Denmark, from a factory that's very, very old. And if you could see the backside of the brick, you could see the thumbprints where the workers are still like removing things. So it's really acknowledging these things that are old and handmade, and how they're used in maybe a new sort of context. This is a, she's a painter from LA, and my wife is a art curator and an advisor. So she sees a lot of different pieces, and she's always trying to sort of choose pieces that suit the room. So this was meant to have colors that were different than what is in the space directly. This main space is really meant to be one thing with no columns, and you're even unsure how it's being held up because this is all glass, and it's a glass corner here. So structurally it had some challenges, but what it allowed to do was kind of have a soaring space like this, where the glass could go to the actual volume, and allowed us to do, you know, big operable doors. And it opens onto the front courtyard, and you really feel like you're part of the street almost. These were created with us and engineered and fabricated by a local metal shop. They're called Drop House, and it starts addressing all like another group of sensory experiences that you don't have when you, when it's closed off. So you hear the wind, you hear people talking, you hear traffic, but the noise isn't sort of debilitating. And part of that is because the mood of this sort of front courtyard sort of balances it out. And you see these two post oaks. This room was meant to be framed by those two trees. I think when you look at a beautiful landscape painting, there's a foreground, a middle ground, and a background, a backdrop. So in architecture, it's the same thing. You're trying to create three planes of experience in every sort of vantage point. Sometimes I try to have a vision for a space, but a lot of times it may start with one thing. So like these little stools by Japanese artisan are, they're some of my favorite pieces in the house. We work every day with interior designers in the office, and we have a lot of furniture made for us as well. That dining room table was made locally by an artisan out of walnut. That's local as well. One carpenter built the entire ceiling. The builder tried to find someone to build this, and it was really difficult to find anyone who commit to it. But there was one shop, and he said, I'll only do it if it's just me. He pretty much lived on a scaffold that he pushed down the space for about four months. But the ceiling is really meant to just be about pattern and texture to knock the scale down. And the wood batting, so it's held off, is meant to reflect sound just to quiet the space down a little bit because we had a hard flooring surface as well. The pattern, the business of the ceiling, takes a big expansive space like this and makes it more human scale. And it allows us to do a clean floor and sort of tidy walls. The sort of noises is above you. If this were a clean white ceiling, it would look like a cathedral or something, and it wouldn't have the right sort of, I don't know, mood to it. We cook a lot, but it's not meant to look like a commercial chef's kitchen, even though we do have a big commercial blue star range, which is my favorite range personally. My mother will come and cook here, and we'll get out the big wok. She's cooked in restaurants, and if you've ever been in a Chinese restaurant and gone in back, the burners back there are 100,000 BTU. A normal, really high-powered burner is maybe 10,000. So these are 30,000. So this gets you close to that without kind of like setting your whole house on fire. I knew I wanted that before we designed the kitchen. Sometimes you start with the things that you really want to have. But then this industrial piece is contrasted with marble, just a classic material. And this island is 16 feet long, so it's meant to be oversized, like ridiculously large, and meant to do everything. Kids can do homework here. We can cook here. People can sit here. This is how my mom cooked, and if you go into a restaurant, it's like what it looks like in back as well. You might call it a mise en place, which is like the things are right adjacent to where you're cooking. Instead of trying to hide it, these are the everyday things we just use constantly. So I think what's always challenging about a kitchen that's sharing space with the living and a dining room is that it starts looking like a kitchen, like in every sort of way. So this was about trying to make the cabinetry look more like, you know, furniture rather than a bunch of drawers and pulls. So everything has the same dimension to it, from the back to this counter to it, the same sort of detailing. And this was meant to take cabinet idea and turn it into a wall, so you can see the lines sort of align through the space. And it was inspired by sort of traditional Asian cabinetry. Intentionally, there's no pulls on it because that kind of tells you immediately like what it's doing. So the pulls are all just sort of hidden underneath and sort of, you know, made custom to sort of to look really, really uniform. This wall was difficult because it does a lot of different things. It's, you know, it's a ton of storage, which push latches. It has built-in equipment. We had to find the right color, sort of like wall oven to go with the paint color. And then it also brings air conditioning and return air to the room at the top. And then there's two speaker grills on either side. So in order to hide all this stuff in one cohesive piece, it was just a lot of coordinating. And we wanted to make sure that you got some sort of shadow lines here, so that when you walked in the house, it didn't look like you're looking at the refrigerator oven wall. It sort of just blended in. In order to make something look effortless, this took a lot of effort. This is the sort of courtyard. The job of this space really is to allow for a lot of glass into the other rooms and to make the inside rooms feel so connected to the outside. They're sharing a sense of space. We prefer smaller spaces, honestly, and this is like an ideal size courtyard for us. The pool, which it's just a place to kind of cool off in the summer, it's designed more like a moorish fountain as opposed to a pool. So this edge is meant to be sat on. We'll put food on there. People will hang out. There'll be lots of people just sitting around the pool. So we don't have to put too much furniture out here, because furniture would have completely kind of filled this space up. Some of the furniture, classic sort of Bertoia chairs from mid-century, and that ship's lantern is from Stelton, another sort of classic design element, Scandinavian. This is a just an end block of wood grain, and they're not very thick. They're about two inches thick, and it's just set on sand. So if we need to ever get to the, there's a roof underneath this material, we can just pull it up and like repair the roof down the line. I'm always looking for a material that would work in a place like this, but I don't know, it just feels organic at the same time. It's also a material that you'll see in really old factory floors. If you go to like an old factory in Detroit from 100 years ago, they used end grain blocks as the flooring material for manufacturing facilities. It's one of the few ways you can put wood outside and have it sort of hold up. This is key space. I wanted a garage that, you know, lived like a real living space, and it really tells you about what I've, you know, what I do in the off time since I was, you know, a teenager, essentially. Deep gearhead sort of culture. I've changed motorcycle transmissions out in the kitchen before when it was too cold outside. So it's just so nice to have a space like this. I found that if I don't have like these cars close by, I won't use them, and then it's almost not worth having them. So this was critical. The fascination started with, you know, I love bicycles, and it was just natural to want a motorcycle. So when I came to Austin when I was, you know, 18, got a job waiting tables, and I remember as soon as I had $400 saved up, I went and bought an old Suzuki GS450 that I rode the snot out of for like years. And then it just went on from there. And then, so I've raced mountain bikes, sport bikes, that sort of competitive scene just is really fantastic. I love it. And then when I had kids, then it was car racing, really, just something a little bit safer, just to have some metal around you. Seem like a sensible thing. Like a lot of people who do these things, they'll tell you that when they're in the seat, you get in that flow state where time stops and you're forced to live in the moment. It's incredibly peaceful. I think that's it. You just are trying to recreate that all the time. So this represents space that, you know, I can get away from work a little bit or just everyday other things. These are cars I've just admired over the years. But these are, to me, just iconographic designs that go back, you know, like the 911, how sort of, you know, backwards the engineering was with the engine being over the rear axle. And this is a 993. It's a 97. So it's, as you probably know, the last generation of the old air-cooled, sort of handmade cars. I think what I love about Porsches is the idea is so simple. The design is essentially one continuous curve that's just flowing into another curve. A lot like this, you know, Mercedes up there, which is a W111 series. Mercedes, that's a 69 280 Opera Coupe. They called it an Opera Coupe. It was just like a nickname because I think it looked like something you would drive to the opera. And it has just incredibly simple lines. In particular, I thought this was cool. This was a period when Mercedes was looking at American cars for inspiration, not the other way around. So they call it a Heckfloss. So it's a finned Mercedes. Yeah, it wouldn't be a garage without a wall of bikes. Loved riding forever as a kid. What I love is the sort of beauty of really good engineering. When the engineering starts looking like art is where I find things like incredibly interesting, you know, gear, lots of gear. But the flow state in design exists really when you can carve away time and kind of emotional energy and try to detach yourself from everything. So I think this is always a good corollary and good training. And what I find myself doing is when I'm working on the shop, on small things, or any of this stuff, just working with my hands, for some reason, allows my mind to just sort of wander a little bit. So I think a lot about design. I find it's really rejuvenating down here. If I don't have it, I, yeah, I'm out of balance. This is the downstairs workshop and sort of den, kind of the downstairs living area, really just a part of the garage. A lot of just small working things, working on projects on the bench. I'll work down here, I'll take Zoom meetings down here. I'll hang out here with friends on occasion. My son will hang out here with friends and do sleepovers. So it's just a nice sort of excess space. A lot of art, like my mother is a painter and did that. A lot of the photography are from friends over the years. And this style of chair, some people called it a safari chair. It was meant to be a lounge chair that you could easily disassemble into the sticks and travel with it. This was probably made in the 50s, maybe even 40s. But the bench, I spend a lot of time here working on little projects, whether it's bicycles, fly reels, or lots of different things. This is a really important space to me. And it's such a luxury to have it. It's not a big room at all. But I think if you have anyone out there listening about man cave advice, it's like, spend the time and money on lighting. I think that's the one thing everyone could do better. Light your cars or your workspace the same way you'd light a living space or a restaurant or a theater or something like that. It just improves the experience immensely. What's also interesting in design and architecture is the impact a psychological study has had. What is it about neuroaesthetics that activates me? So now it's the job of every house to provide that spectrum. That's why this house, like you see, it's connected to the outdoors. But it also has an incredible sense of privacy. So it's like, what can be better than being in the middle of the city but still feel like you have a place that is, you know, kind of your own.