This San Antonio House Puts History in the Front, Party in the Back (2024)

Life has a funny way of throwing full-circle moments into the mix. For lifelong San Antonio resident Stacey Hill, one began nearly 15 years ago at a dinner party hosted within a renovated 1870s home in the city’s Lavaca neighborhood. The house’s thick, caliche stone walls, rough-hewn long leaf pine rafters, and postage stamp–size footprint betrayed its humble working-class roots; from the street it appeared no bigger than a Monopoly house. But further in, the house held a secret—a modern extension embracing a private courtyard and swimming pool. “There was something about it that stuck with me,” Hill remembers, “But, you know, my life took me in a totally different direction.”

The years flew by, bringing with them a series of home renovations, and a divorce. In 2018, though, a real estate listing caught Hill’s eye. “It was like, ‘Oh, that house.”

With three grown daughters, Hill craved a larger space to call her own when she was home in San Antonio (she splits her time between the Texan city and Los Angeles). She put in an offer and the Lavaca house was hers. “It was the first house I’d ever had the freedom to design without a partner putting their two cents in,” Hill says.

Fortunately a sensitive renovation and expansion by the local architect Candid Rogers in 2010 meant that any ensuing refurbishment would be a light touch. But, Hill says, “I decided to change it to something that was more suitable for me”—not to mention for her collection of more than 200 objects and artworks. “I am a huge collector of oddities,” Hill adds. “My happy place is going into an estate sale.”

Hill found her ideal renovation partner in architect Vicki Yuan, an associate partner at the San Antonio firm Lake | Flato. “She really wanted to work with a female architect. And I was like, ‘Hey, that’s me!’” Yuan jokes. More importantly, Yuan “got” Hill’s aesthetic: “Buttoned up, but also very organic and weird,” per the homeowner.

“Her vision was Donald Judd meets Jayne Mansfield,” Yuan says.

At first blush, terms like organic and weird and Jayne Mansfield are references that exist well outside of Lake | Flato’s lexicon. Over the years, the firm has racked up awards for climate-sensitive and regionally specific schools, public parks, and residences. But Yuan embraced the plunge into pretty: “It was my first time really zooming into all the interior scope,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m the Donald Judd to your Jayne Mansfield, Stacey.’”

Before Yuan and Hill could begin layering on the Jayne Mansfield glamour, however, there was some reconfiguring to tackle. “We looked at every space with a fresh pair of eyes,” Yuan explains. “It was surgical.” Since the existing foundation needed to be redone in the historic portion of the home, Yuan was able to rejigger the layout to allow for a bedroom suite at the front portion of the house. She also reconceived the outdoor courtyard, maximizing the site to include a new, spa-worthy pool and additional amenities like an outdoor kitchen and shower. Rooms in the modern wing received cosmetic upgrades, like refacing the kitchen cabinets and cladding the kitchen island base in funky, handmade tiles.

Some of the most dramatic changes resulted from simply ditching the home’s austere white paint job. “I’m an architect who is stereotypically nervous about color,” Yuan qualifies, but she embraced what she calls “makeup tones”—beiges, peaches, and buffs—to give the house a warm, feminine energy. For instance, rosy grass-cloth and plaster panels cover the walls of the primary bedroom, where a monumental black antique painting depicting a woman’s face surrounded by flowers (another flea market purchase from Hill) functions as a sort of ceiling-height headboard.

Then, of course, there was the question of how to display Hill’s oddities, which—among other things accumulated on global travels, include Mexican Santos, Maasai beads, a collection of seashells, as well as the scores of paintings and photographs by local San Antonio artists. Yuan found a solution in a gleaming brass picture rail that traces the perimeter of the historic portion. The move allows Hill to change the arrangement as she pleases, without having to drill holes into the caliche stone walls. To get the placement just right, the architect printed off thumbnail-size versions of each artwork and arranged them within a mini diorama. Today the room, with its lofty exposed ceilings and its artfully hung works, feels like a Lone Star state version of an 18th-century salon.

No surprise, Yuan caught the collecting bug from Hill. After an excursion to the Round Top Antiques Fair, the flea market mecca two hours east of San Antonio, the pair “hacked” a set of matching dressers to become a double-sided dressing table. A trompe l'oeil Chinese-style screen, meanwhile, was repurposed to serve as paneling for her closet. A vintage chest of drawers and a turquoise basin, meanwhile, has new life as a vanity.

“Giving something another chapter just makes it even more special,” the architect says—proof that everything deserves a full-circle moment.