Home Owners’ Imagination Brought to Life
Like Magic
Words by Jess Hagemann Photos by Casey Woods
Nicole Blair, licensed architect and the creative mind behind Studio 512, likens the process of collaborating with clients on their dream homes to divination. She’s not reading tea leaves or tarot, but she’s definitely getting inside their heads.
“I make a point to get to know my clients and what their tastes are,” Blair says. “I try to imagine myself as them. If they were an architect, what would they be designing for themselves in their wildest imagination?”
What she’s going for is that magic moment when someone asks the client if they designed it themselves. “It often happens,” notes Blair, “that a client will speak of the design as their own vision or comment that I have good taste. That means I’ve done a good job understanding their taste and involving them as a partner in the design process.”
One perfect example of her crafty ways is the East Austin Bungalow, finished ten years ago now. An artist and a UT employee respectively had a singular vision for their home’s aesthetic, but as young newlyweds, they were also working on the budget of two twenty-somethings.
As Blair explains, they’d already bought the property, complete with a 1400 square foot bungalow, when they reached out to her about planning the necessary renovations. Apart from a new metal roof, underpinning, and a fresh coat of paint, the exterior was in fairly good shape; the inside,
however, was a different story.
“The house had great bones, but the floor plan was outdated and didn’t address their needs,” Blair says. Her clients wanted an open floor plan, more storage, space for laundry, books, and sewing, and a guest bedroom that didn’t yet exist.
Blair’s challenge? To maximize the home’s design, while minimizing costs.
As for the home owners, they kept busy building, sourcing, and staging the funky blend of vintage, upcycled, and meaningful modern pieces.
Her clients contracted the project themselves, hiring their woodworker-friend to complete the woodwork and framing. At Blair’s suggestion, they reclaimed the longleaf pine from the walls they’d opted to remove and used it to line a new upstairs loft space for that coveted guest bed, as well as wall-to-wall shelving. The doors from the closets they took out became patchwork stairsteps and the back of the kitchen peninsula. Ingeniously, a hidden washer and dryer are tucked inside that built-in bookcase!
Meanwhile, they rescued lights from Habitat ReStore and found appliances and a brand-new bathtub on Craigslist. Her clients won a marble slab at a UT auction, around which Blair designed a long, slim bath vanity top.
The end result is a place that feels warm and well-suited to the client: a win for the owners and also for architect-sorceress Blair, who thrives on “compact design and coming up with creative ways to use every inch of space.”
Angles, Lines, and Layers
An Austin native, Nicole Blair first realized her passion for design as a student at Kealing Middle School, when a job fair vendor described architecture as “math for people who liked the arts.” Recognizing herself in that vocation, she interned at an architect’s office in high school, then attended Cornell University for Textiles and Apparel Design, before earning a master’s degree in Architecture from Rice University.
Blair founded her one-woman East Austin architecture firm, Studio 512, in 2004. Today, Blair’s early foray into fashion influences her architectural style, as she loves “playing with geometry and form three-dimensionally” to create “layered looks” that meet the eclectic visions of her clients.
Contact:
Studio 512
(512) 474-9733
1902 E 11th St.
studio512.net
