Some hilltop sites make you work for every board. The Reichert Residence in Dripping Springs was one of those — the land was beautiful and the views were worth it, but there was no dropping materials at the foundation. We hand-carried everything up. That’s ranch building in the Texas Hill Country.
The house was designed by a well-known Austin architect, and our job was to build it faithfully — reading the plan and translating every detail into the real thing. The design leaned hard into the land: metal roof, native stone, and cedar pulled directly from the property. The porch columns and headers were milled from that same site-harvested cedar, bark stripped and worked into structural and decorative elements. Getting raw timber to behave cleanly in those roles took some doing, but the porches are better for it.
Inside, the house packs more than it looks like it should. There’s a wine cellar, a rooftop observatory, and a custom iron staircase built by a local Austin artisan. The layout is compact but the spaces work — nothing wasted, everything intentional.
What came together in the end was a house that felt like it had always been on that hill. Metal roof catching the light, stone and cedar grounding it to the site, views from the rooftop that make you understand why someone built up there in the first place.
Part of our job on a project like this is being the builder who can read an architect’s plan and execute it without losing anything in translation. Reichert is a good example of what that looks like when it works.
