Willa.

Austin, Texas

Land Acquisition

Formerly the site of the Angel Funeral Home, the owners of the funeral home approached StoryBuilt about purchasing their land for development in 2015. They had determined to close their business and sell the land and were familiar with our work along the South First corridor. StoryBuilt purchased the land and began design in 2016.

Design Challenge

While the Bouldin neighborhood in Austin is very low density, comprised of mostly single-story and two-story cottages built at the turn of the century, South First Street, which runs through the heart of Bouldin, has been designated as a “Core Transit Corridor.” In Austin, this means that higher density/larger scale development will be allowed along South First Street, but not allowed within the neighborhoods themselves. Relegating density to major streets only is a unique urban strategy and presented one of the greatest design challenges to the StoryBuilt team. Willa is the largest building ever built on South First Street, and it backs up against single story residences. Our building is a bridge between the small-scale residential fabric of the Bouldin neighborhood and the dynamic energy and evolving scale of South First Street. Coupled with fact that South First’s current streetscape is abysmal, with a 4’ sidewalk at the back of curb and with cars whizzing by, to walk down South First Street is take one’s life in their own hands. Added to this the blazing sun and little to no overhangs due to the buildings being a few feet from the curb, our South First Street design challenge revolved around the relationship of our building to the urban edges and environment.

Building Programming

Our goal was to provide a home for both residents and tenants who love the quirky, walkable character of the Bouldin neighborhood. While many residential developers consider their required ground floor commercial space to be a loss and solely invest their energy into the residential portion of the building, at StoryBuilt, we treat our ground floor programming like critical neighbors worthy of a strong investment. As a company, we hold onto our commercial tenant space for the long term and manage it through our in-house property management group, so it is of significant interest to our team to create the right ground floor design to attract tenants and users alike. We want our communities to thrive 24 hours a day. Three stories of residential condominiums are located above this ground floor podium, while three floors of parking underground service all stakeholders, including the public.

Building Design

The architecture of Willa is centered around how the building edges respond to the neighborhood and the environment. The site is approximately 200 feet deep by 300 feet wide. The depth of the site lent itself to a courtyard form, which would also allow for a cooler, shaded space in the center of the block. The compatibility setbacks required by zoning created a heavily stepped massing in all directions. While considering our Willa would be baking in the sun, due to the majority of its surfaces facing south and west with no shading from other structures, the form of the building began to reveal itself to our team. The use of the horizontal line became a design strategy that solved many of the challenges Willa was facing:

Challenges & Solutions

• Organizational: Making the horizontal line the primary expression of the building would allow us to organize the messy stepped massing within this element.
• Environmental: Large overhangs could provide much needed shading for the building and act as large outdoor terraces for residents.
• Relational: Horizontal projections could act as a strong mediator between the low scale residential elements surrounding the building, and the large mass of the building itself. Occupying this space with people, plantings and furnishings would activate the edge of the building, which we felt was a much gentler neighbor than a wall of glass. We could also intersperse the occupied terraces with devices such as trellises, which relate to the lower scale residential elements of the homes below and help create a more varied filtering of light around the building throughout the day.

Beginning at the ground level’s urban edge along South First Street, we improved the public’s experience by pulling the building back from the street considerably to create a larger, more enjoyable landscaped sidewalk area, shaded by these large overhangs. To make the ground floor feel as public and open as possible, we carved out a large open market in the middle of the commercial frontage, that leads to the interior courtyard to be enjoyed by all. The long-term goal is to fill this market space with trailers and kiosks to support local vendors. The long façade at the ground level is broken up by masonry masses that harken to the single-story masonry structures along South First.

While the urban edge’s siting, massing and openness allow the public to enjoy the entire ground floor of the community, the edges of the rest of the project reveal a pattern of terraces, trellises, and glazing. Along the south and western edges of the outside of the building and inside the courtyard, overhangs vary from 4 to 6 feet deep, providing the maximum amount of shading. Along north facing facades, this reduces from 4’ to no overhang at all. The building’s mechanical system continues the theme of energy efficiency, as it is a VRF system, which is rarely seen in condominium residential buildings. While the overall cost of system was approximately 20% higher than a more traditional Split DX System, we anticipate homeowners to enjoy reduced energy consumption of that percentage or greater.

Project Gallery

• 
• 
• 
• 

Location
Austin, TX

Project Type/Number of Units
61 condos, 25,000 sf Commercial

Design Team
Dan Sokolosky, Kristen Padavic, Ian Lee