Houston, TX

In Houston, where bigger means better and suburbanites in SUVs dominate the highways, architects Dawn Finley and Mark Wamble are anomalies: Their domestic lives fit into 1,200 square feet, and their commute to work is but a walk downstairs.

"We like the challenge of having a big life in a small house," says Wamble, "getting rid of what we don’t need."

The couple spend most of their professional lives devising public projects and institutional spaces or cultivating heady architectural theories—both teach design at Rice School of Architecture, where they met—but had never designed a residence before their own. They wanted an unadorned and uncomplicated house, a reaction to the chaotic sprawl of the city around them. The result is a two-story rectangular box covered in corrugated metal that is a home upstairs and an office for their five-person design firm, Interloop—Architecture, below. At times, it’s both on each floor. "We wanted to be above, separate from the work space, but sometimes they overlap," Finley says. "We have open acoustics. There are no secrets here."

After searching for a lot for two years, the couple settled on one at the edge of the city’s museum district, wedged up against some trees with Highway 59 just beyond. While traffic-choked urban arteries don’t always make great neighbors, particularly in a city that’s notoriously congested, Finley and Wamble saw potential advantages. They oriented the 48-by-24-foot structure to maximize the views of the highway behind the house and some massive live oak trees in front. "The highway, the power lines, the bridge—some people would consider eyesores," Wamble notes. "We like them." 

The placement has had some unexpected benefits: A breeze from the highway blows through the house, cutting the steamy Gulf Coast heat, and sometimes the traffic helps them put their three-year-old son, Leroy, to bed. "We talk about the trucks going by," Finley says. "It’s a way to get him to sleep."

Finley and Wamble are known for their ingenious fabrications and elegant design solutions. In their design for the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, which features work by James Turrell, they built a contextually sympathetic and handicap-accessible bench—out of nearly 500 pounds of stone—that could fold and unfold with the touch of a hand. But for their house, they kept the plans simple and easy to execute. "This was a budget-driven project, and we tried to make the detailing as simple as possible," Wamble says, noting that most everything in the house was built with standard construction methods. "We were aware of what it would mean if we got obsessive about the details, so we made it very straightforward for the builders."