The clients for this 6,500-square-foot residence didn’t have much trouble envisioning a new house on their infill site in Dallas’ Preston Hollow neighborhood. That’s because builder Richard Dietrichson had demolished the existing ranch house before they ever laid eyes on the property. The lot sat there, prepped and ready to build on, just the way he likes it. “When the house is removed and the land is cleared, the trees trimmed and the land leveled off, the phone rings off the hook,” he says. “People can visualize a new home.”
Dietrichson has transformed his company into an in-town builder by following the desires of his custom home clients. “From the mid-1980s to the late ’90s, we built in new subdivisions,” he says. “That was the kind of builder we used to be. Today we don’t build in new subdivisions because the client wants to be in town. They’re looking for character, trees, an established neighborhood. They want to set the house in a piece of property where the trees are 50 or 100 years old. We’ve been kind of forced to go in [and tear down existing houses] because there are just no lots in town any more. You’ve got to go so far to find land, and that’s just not around where these executives, doctors, and lawyers work.” Sometimes he buys an older house and scrapes it off, selling the lot to an individual client (as in the case of the Preston Hollow house) or occasionally building a spec house. In other cases the clients already own their land, and he acts solely as the general contractor.
The Preston Hollow clients hired Dallas-based Bernbaum Magadini Architects to design a house that would marry the modern tastes of the wife with the more traditional style favored by the husband. The firm complied, pulling off an exterior that combines the tiled roof and layered forms of a Tuscan farmhouse with clean, contemporary lines and steel-framed windows. Conscious of the damage done to the community fabric when a new house towers over its neighbors, the architects staggered the project’s massing so that much of its second story steps back from the first. The Preston Hollow design review board requires a substantial 75-foot street setback, so Bernbaum Magadini created a walled dining room patio to reclaim some of the front yard.
As for the L-shaped floor plan, it carefully takes into account the close proximity of the homes flanking the property to the east and west. “The west side is private because the house doglegs around to block the neighbors’ view into the yard,” says Patricia Magadini. “The other side faces landscaping and the [other] neighbors’ garage.” Strategic window placement also helps preserve privacy, while a series of recessed, covered outdoor rooms serves a similar purpose. The home’s open layout lets in plenty of natural light, an amenity many home buyers just can’t find enough of in an older house. “The neighborhood is kind of in transition,” Magadini says. “It’s mostly small ranch homes people are selling for the land.” Not everyone is happy about this trend, since not every new house handles design and placement as sensitively as this one does. “It’s definitely a hot issue here,” she says.
Dietrichson understands the complexities of the teardown issue, sympathetically pointing to the increase in property taxes longtime residents can face when higher-value houses go up in their neighborhoods. “At the same time, everything has to be fixed eventually,” he says. “The houses built in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s have termites and cracking; a major renovation has to be done sooner or later. The [housing stock] needs to be revitalized. That’s kind of where Dallas is today.”
Project Credits
Builder: Dietrichson Co., Richardson, Texas; Architect: Bernbaum Magadini Architects, Dallas; Landscape architect: David Rolston Landscape Architects, Dallas; Living space: 6,500 square feet; Site: .4 acre; Construction cost: $225 a square foot; Photographer: Charles Davis Smith.
