When dealing with the summer sun in Dallas, it’s best to take a worst-case-scenario approach.
That is what architect Scott Specht decided when designing an 8,826-square-foot, single-story, modern home in the city’s Preston Hollow neighborhood. Mr. Specht, founding principal of Austin-based Specht Architects, used a computer modeling device to track where the sun would hit the house during every day of the year.
That showed him which parts of the interior of the home would be most directly affected by the sun. Then he designed cantilevered overhung sections of the roof to create shade where needed. To eliminate a need for columns to hold up the overhangs, Mr. Specht designed a large, floating, pavilion roof, made of a highly engineered steel with an extremely thin edge, that hovers over both the interior sections of the house and the courtyard.
“The best green strategies are passive,” he says. “That has the highest impact on energy use.”
Scott Specht, founding principal of Austin-based Specht Architects, designed this 8,826 square-foot house in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas. The master bedroom has a stone-clad fireplace.
The living room has large areas of glass windows.
A breakfast nook, just off the kitchen, is grounded by an architectural concrete wall
The home’s living room.
Photo: Casey Dunn
The interior walls are smooth concrete.
Photo: Casey DunnThe part of the floating roof that hangs over the interior spaces is connected to the home’s walls with clerestory windows, which start at the top of the walls and go up to the ceiling, allowing the roof to visually float by filling in the space between the top of the walls and the bottom of the roof with a transparent band of glass. The section of the roof over the exterior courtyard has a large square hole, below which is a receptacle for collecting rainwater that is used for the property’s landscaping.
The house, which cost around $6 million to build, has four bedrooms and six bathrooms and sits on 1.5 acres. Further blocking the intrusion of excess light and sound are two massive, concrete walls—one 220 feet and the other 217 feet—that separate the house from the road. Mr. Specht says such protection was especially important because of the home's floor-to-ceiling glass walls.
Water plays a large part in the design as well. Beginning at the entry, a narrow, pebbled fountain runs along a wall, with several small waterfalls. It stops at the house and then picks up again in back, flowing along the edge of the rectangular pool.
“It is quiet and calm, like a private oasis,” says Brandie Gehan, 39, who built the house with her husband Tim Gehan, 58. The design and construction was a three-year process, starting with a tour of several homes Mr. Specht designed in Connecticut and ending when the concrete walls were finally finished. The couple moved in last June.
A view of the home’s cantilevered roof overhangs and yard.
Photo: Casey DunnMr. Gehan started Gehan Homes with his two brothers and his father in Dallas in 1991. The company was acquired in 2016. Two years later, Mr. Gehan started another home-building company called UnionMain Homes.
The houses Mr. Gehan builds for a living are nothing like the home he built for himself. They come from stock plans, take about seven months to construct and sell for anywhere from $288,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,874-square-foot brick house to $373,000 for a five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 3,615-square-foot, two-story house.
“It’s a completely different kind of project,” says Mr. Gehan. The experience of working with an architect on his own home taught him a lot about modern houses. He was amazed by the level of detail required and the complication involved in creating a clean and simple aesthetic. That less-cluttered, simpler look will start to make its way into his production houses, he says.
Mrs. Gehan says her husband’s experience helped in their approach to the process. They had every detail, material and cost nailed down before construction began so that there were no surprises—something that took seven months to complete. “We didn’t want any change orders or ambiguity,” she says.
The only element that took the couple off guard was just how long and involved a process it was to get the two large exterior walls exactly right. They had considered using stone and stucco, but Mr. Specht convinced them that the most arresting effect would only come from concrete. “It’s a real material,” he says. He wanted the surface of the concrete to be ribbed, to create a sparkling effect which comes from catching the sun in different directions.
What resulted was a complicated process of making the right mold to create the perfect form and then ensuring there was a continuous, on-site pouring to avoid any breaks. The walls took seven months and cost around $720,000. “We had a lot of conversations about that,” says Mrs. Gehan.
The house’s overall style is what Mr. Specht calls “new brutalist.” It is a nod to the architectural movement known as Brutalism that gained a following in the 1950s, most famously practiced by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier and by Paul Rudolph, former chairman of the architecture department at Yale University.
But in this project, the raw, grounded heaviness of the concrete is lightened by the floating steel roof and the walls of glass windows. “It has a distinct modernist style,” says Mr. Specht.
Write to Nancy Keates at nancy.keates@wsj.com
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