It sits on a limestone bluff overlooking the west fork of the Medina River, a serene waterway shaded by cypress trees and favored by canoeists. Inspired by Fredericksburg’s vernacular architecture, Salas-Humara built for his client a 7,000-square-foot compound located on a 500-acre ranch outside the historic town of Medina, 275 miles from Fredericksburg. It is not unusual to find all three building phases-log, half-timbering, and stone-in individual German houses with successive additions.Įxposed stone walls and salvaged flooring create a home that looks as though it has existed for more than a century. “The houses organically grew like that.” Fredericksburg is a “gold mine of this type of architecture,” says Salas-Humara. “A family would maybe start with a log cabin, add a barn…with success they added on,” observes the architect. In Fredericksburg, Salas-Humara was struck by the number of multi-structure residential compounds he saw. Walls of hewn stone masonry were common in Hessian and Frankish regions of Germany, where such stonework typically appears in the ground floor of the house, and upper levels display fachwerk, also known as half-timbering. Eventually, they quarried the abundant limestone around them to build strong rock houses. They saw potential in the indigenous raw materials in this Texas Hill Country region of tall, rugged hills made of limestone or granite, covered with thin layers of soil.Īt first the Germans copied the log houses being built by transplants from the East Coast. ![]() As the immigrants adapted to their new environment, they crafted what they could, incorporating what was available and learning from each other. Seeking land and opportunities, they arrived with an arsenal of Old World building traditions and skills. ![]() “He wanted to go the full mile.” So for inspiration and to conduct extensive research, he headed a few hours northeast of the construction site to Fredericksburg, where the 40-block Historic District is one of the earliest Germanic settlements in the state.įounded in 1846, Fredericksburg welcomed the first generations of German settlers. “My client really wanted everything to be as accurate as possible,” says Salas-Humara. When Ignacio Salas-Humara’s client requested a new home that would look 150 years old when finished, it was the first time that the south central Texas architect was asked to design a historical house…not just a historical-looking house. ![]() Ceiling fans on the porch provide cool breezes during the long Texas summers.
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