Comfort Castle combines medieval and contemporary design

Hale and her late husband, Earl, bought the two bedroom, 2½ bath house, built in the Falling Water neighborhood in 2000, about eight years ago after moving here from Dallas. They were the home’s third owners. 

Asked to identify the home’s style, the designer, Comfort-based architect Ignacio Salas-Humara, hesitated.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s a hybrid for sure.” 

Call it feudal meets contemporary. Extending out from the German schmear limestone tower at the center are two stucco-faced wings that, following the topography of the hill behind it, curve slightly inward, as if to gently embrace that arriving visitor.

Salas-Humara said he deliberately designed this side of the house with relatively few windows, in part to delay the big reveal when that visitor walks in the front door.

The first thing one sees upon entering is, first, a spiral staircase leading to the second floor and just beyond, the back of a standalone fireplace in the middle of the central living area.

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Besides the reveal, Salas-Humara said he designed it this way because the original owners, who were artists, wanted a house with as few doors and right angles as possible. He decided to place the wood-burning fireplace in the middle of the room instead of against a wall to serve as a visual portal into the room. 

“Once you walk past the fireplace, all of sudden, boom, you see all these glass windows looking out over a magnificent, 20-mile view to the east,” he said.

This isn’t the only place where he used freestanding objects to break up the rooms.

In the primary suite, for example, there’s not a wall between the sleep chamber and the bathroom. Instead, the rooms are separated visually, first by a large wood structure that serves as both a headboard on the bed side and provides cabinet storage on the other. And second by a standalone, barrel-shaped shower silo with a textured metal surface that acts to separate the two spaces.

Salas-Humara said this was the first time he ever designed a home with such features. 

“In talking with the original homeowners, I was listening to their ideas and then incorporating my own ideas,” he said. “I love the concept of minimal walls and a minimal number of doors.”

The house is designed in three separate segments or, as Salas-Humara calls them, “pods,” each radiating out and over the side of the hill, with one in the center and one each on either side angled away.

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The center pod is the home’s main living space, where the fireplace is located. To the left is the main bedroom suite, and the one to the right contains the kitchen and dining room and an office space.

Since each pod juts out at a different angle, they all have slightly different views from their own deck. 

“The house has seven different decks, including ones off the studio and one off a guest house that’s built down below the main house,” Hale said. “They’re great for just sitting outside, drinking wine and enjoying the view. It’s like being in a tree house.” 

With plenty of white walls and indirect natural lighting, the house also serves as a crisp, clean gallery to display Hale and her late husband’s extensive collection of contemporary art.

“My husband started collecting art while practicing law in Dallas, and when we got married, we collected lots more,” she said. “We bought this house because it would highlight our contemporary style. There aren’t that many Hill Country houses that can do that.” 

Still, they made the house their own. After moving in, for example, they turned what had been an open carport into an enclosed garage and another six-car garage into a separate aerobic studio/game room that can also serve as an extra bedroom for guests.

“My son, who is an architect, redesigned the building to mirror what Ignacio had done,” she said.

In the kitchen, they reconfigured the island by removing a sink, adding drawers to hold a recycling bin and other storage items, and installed some much-needed cabinets and a double oven.

“It was easy to come in here and adapt things to what we needed,” she said.

After renovating the island, they tried without success to match the granite countertops elsewhere in the kitchen, so instead, they added a stainless steel top for a more contemporary look.

The kitchen also continues the home’s no-right-angles theme right down to that island that, rather than a typical rectangle or square, is trapezoidal so the edges run parallel to the countertops on either side that are themselves angled.

They also converted what had been a media room into a home office/TV room to better suit their needs.

The flooring throughout the house is stone flagstones in silvers and golds. The stone used contains naturally occurring mica, giving it a subtly interesting sparkle.

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“The guy who set these individual flagstones into concrete was a real artist,” Salas-Humara said. “He did a spectacular job fitting all the individual pieces together like a puzzle.”

At the opposite end of the house, the bathroom mixes cream-colored travertine countertops, sinks and the built-in bathtub with golden grained hickory cabinets.

“I had used travertine on another house around the same time this one was being built and it turned out great,” Salas-Humara said. “And Mies van der Rohe, one of my architectural heroes, often used travertine and I just love the idea of it. It adds a warmth because one of the drawbacks of modern minimalism is it’s cold.”

Salas-Humara also went to great lengths to bring as much natural light as possible into the bathroom, designing it with windows narrower and higher than usual, even one at floor level beneath the vanity makeup table.

“I wanted to make sure it was bright enough without you having to turn on the lights,” he said. 

A visit to the Hale home wouldn’t be complete without climbing to the top of the tower, which requires first climbing the winding staircase to the second floor and then clambering up a ladder to the flat top of the battlement. 

“We come up here just to take in the views and watch the buzzards fly around,” Hale said. “There are three of them that we named Moe, Larry and Curly.”

At least they’re not unladen swallows.

[email protected] | Twitter: @RichardMarini