Young couple gets very modern wish: a dream house
Aileen Wang and An Pham are planners. From the time they graduated dental school and got married, they knew they’d find a way to get their dream home.
They visited Sunday open houses, went on home tours and even knocked on doors of homes they admired, just to see if their owners would share the name of their architect or builder. Every now and then someone would answer — one even invited them in and showed them around.
That’s how they came to understand what a new home could cost, what they wanted and why they’d need to build to get exactly what they wanted.
“We started knocking on doors. We were shameless about finding out who designed houses we liked,” said Wang, 36, an orthodontist with her own practice, Wang Smiles Orthodontics in Meyerland. Pham, 36, is a dentist at Clear Lake Dental Care in Webster.
The more they looked, the more they were drawn to modern architecture and midcentury charm. They also realized that a new home was going to cost a lot more than they thought — teardown lots were routinely going for $500,000 — so as a preliminary step they bought an affordable townhome and built equity they could use as a down payment.
The townhome was traditional in style, but each time they bought furniture, they made sure it was modern enough to work in their dream home. When it came time to move, they didn’t also want to replace what they’d already bought.
Today, a series of family photos — taken in front of their home in the Ayrshire section of Braeswood Place — shows the progression of construction from its earliest stages to move-in date.
Many homes on their street flooded during Hurricane Harvey, so construction projects dot the area, including the lot behind them. StudioMET architects did the design/build work on their home, elevating it 5 feet because they started work when the area was in a 100-year flood plain before the hurricane.
The view out their back windows is of a new home under construction behind them, elevated so high that you can see straight into its first floor over the top of Wang and Pham’s 8-foot fence.
Architects Stephen Andrews and Hector Ochoa describe the front of Wang and Pham’s 4,055square-foot home as an unconventional entrance for this modern home. First, a series of thick concrete pads serves as a staircase to a door in a 10-foot fence of Fortress composite decking in a steel frame.
From the street, the home is an attractive compilation of planes and geometrics, assembled in a variety of materials, steel, decking, manganese-oxidecoated brick and big panes of glass.
When you step behind this tall fence, you’re in a courtyard set up to feel like part of the home. So when you get to the door of the actual structure, it’s one more giant pane of glass.
Both Wang and Pham love the house, but Pham is as happy as a kid at Christmas. The home was meant to be one of several on the Modern Architecture + Design Society’s Modern Home Tour in late March. Postponed because
of the novel coronavirus pandemic, it will be rescheduled to a date in June or later.
The couple hasn’t bought much art just yet, still seeing the home’s architecture as its most attractive feature.
High-contrast black and white stand out in the large kitchen: the same charcoal-gray exterior brick paired with bright white, high-gloss cabinets. The veiny gray quartz used on the counters repeats in all of the bathrooms. There’s also an 18-foot island with room for a few barstools, and this is Wang’s favorite place in the home because it’s where they spend a good deal of time.
They filled their living room with the modern furniture they’d been collecting, including a pair of low-profile sofas and a pair of midcentury-inspired leather chairs. A cove in the wall has a slim built-in unit for storage, and what looks like a piece of art on the wall is really their TV.
“We didn’t want a big black box in the living room. People told me I should get a bigger TV, but I think this is the perfect size,” Pham said of their Samsung Art TV as his wife joked that for a long time their boys didn’t even know it was a TV.
Andrews described two features inside the home as tools he and his studioMET colleagues like to use because they’re updated interpretations of midcentury design: screens. At the home’s front door and near a short hall to the master suite, they’ve composed a series of tall metal rods spaced a few inches apart vertically.
At the front of the home, they help obscure the fact that you enter the wide kitchen. Near the back, it creates a type of wall that forms the back of the dining room and shields you from the master suite.
The couple wanted a first-floor guest suite, expecting that Wang’s parents — immigrants who came to the U.S. from Shanghai when their daughter was just 7 — would stay over often. Instead, they built their own home two doors down, so that suite is being used by Wang and Pham’s boys, 6-year-old Carlin and 4-year-old Reed.
Next to it is a small room with pocket doors. Someday it will be an in-home office, but while the boys are young it serves as their playroom, with shelves and bins for their books, trucks, dinosaurs and other toys.
A few simple conveniences were built in, satisfying Wang’s love of organization. The master closet has a set of double doors among lower cabinets that serves as a passthrough to the laundry room on the other side of the wall.
It’s the perfect fit for a laundry basket — or for two little boys who like to play hide-and-seek.
The kitchen pantry backs up to the garage, and a similar door allows them to put groceries or other packages in there directly instead of having to haul them up a set of stairs to the elevated home. Around the corner is the clever mudroom, where Wang had Andrews, Ochoa and their team devise a custom, over-sized peg board for kids’ hats, jackets and backpacks, allowing the items to move to higherplaced pegs as they grow.
Style and functionality are obvious aspects of this home, but Ochoa also notes some things you may not readily notice.
First, they used energyefficient HVAC units and windows as well as sprayfoam insulation that often allows people building bigger homes to end up paying lower utility bills. They also used Brazilian ipe, a dense hardwood that works well in Houston’s climate because it’s moldand pest resistant.