Casa TreCortile
The house of three courtyards.
Responding to the clients' desire to marry interior and exterior — to melt the division between building and nature — Casa Tre Cortile creates three distinct exterior rooms spread out across the broad hillside. The clients did not want to obscure the ridge, so the home becomes a long horizontal form located just below the ridge-line, dissolving into limestone and stucco as it meets the land.
One courtyard contains a plunge pool inspired by the architect's summer in San Miguel de Allende; another holds an outdoor shower drawn from a client's memory of Belize. Thirty thousand gallons of rainwater are collected from the slanted live roof. Panoramic views run through the house as concrete, limestone, and stucco façades dissolve into twelve-foot full-height glass.
The home sits on a fifty-acre estate at the crown of a long hill. The architecture refuses to dominate it — instead it lies down, becoming an extension of the topography. From inside, the rolling Texas landscape is the artwork; the building, its frame.