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As he comes across buildings and houses that are being torn down, architect Jonathan Card finds material that can still be useful, rather than hauled off to a landfill. He’s brought some of it back to life at his new house, Casa de Tarjetas, or House of Cards in Spanish.
The Beacon Hill home of Jonathan and Heather Card is all about reincarnation and second chances. The house itself is repurposed; it was erected in the last century as a commercial building. This century it became a residential loft when previous owners turned what had been an automotive garage into their home.
The Cards bought the Spanish eclectic building in late 2006 and spent much of the next year converting the nearly 2,500-square-foot space into a three-bedroom home for themselves and their two young daughters.
“We gutted it completely, except for the loft that was there and the mechanical system. Everything else that you see is new,” Jonathan says.
It’s new construction using old material.
“The majority of it was framed out of salvage lumber,” he says. “Every piece of wood that you see was either salvaged from somewhere else or was here. All of the trim, all of the siding and everything came off other buildings.”
He bought studs and siding from a four-plex being torn down in Alamo Heights. The acoustic panels on the ceiling were peeled off the walls of an office that had been vacated next to his.
The maple wood on the stairs and upstairs floors came from a fire-damaged house.
“We had to clean all the tongues and grooves and put it all back together,” he says.
Sixteen windows out of an old school had been sitting at a friend’s lumberyard when Jonathan bought them. Another friend donated windows salvaged from an Austin automotive shop.
The windows contribute to the expansiveness of the high-ceilinged living room. Rather than build solid walls in the upstairs bedrooms, Jonathan used windows as walls that face the living room. Curtains can be pulled across them for privacy.
By design, the living room connects with all the other rooms in the house. It’s open to the kitchen and dining area.
In the kitchen, new IKEA base cabinets were mounted in 40-inch-tall steel frames, 4 inches higher than normal “because my wife and I are both taller,” he notes. “It’s saved my back doing dishes.”
A concrete-topped island separates the kitchen from the dining area. The floor is the original slab, exposing cracks and repaired spots. The Cards love the look and its sturdiness.
“It’s fairly bulletproof,” Jonathan says of the floor, and the house in general.