A 1930s Home In Austin, Texas Gets A Contemporary Makeover

There’s an important design concept that most architects study during their educations. It’s typically associated with old-school modernists like architect Louis Kahn and projects dating back to the 1950’s and 60’s. Simply put, the concept aims towards grouping all of the service spaces of a building together. These often include the stairways, hallways, utilities, bathrooms, or any other support spaces required to serve the primary functions of the building.

Taking the concept a step further, when grouped thoughtfully, these service groups can become a design feature in and of themselves.Being the rather organized architects that we are, this design concept has always resonated with us, not just from a systematic standpoint, but also in terms of visual harmony, authenticity and even the cost-effectiveness of such a straight-forward strategy.

It’s a design concept that’s been integrated into many of our projects, regardless of scale. While the effectiveness of this design concept improves with the increasing scale of a project (like multi-family buildings and commercial structures), we’ve also found it to be a powerful design tool on smaller projects like single family residences.