Property of Mr. Ralph A. Anderson, jr., Houston, Texas | Architects: Bishop & Walker

10/06/2025 12:38:00 PM

To build a house in town after years of living in the suburbs may well take a radical change in your perspective on space. Your first sight of the typical city lot-cramped in size and hemmed in by neighbors will no doubt be dismaying, especially if you have in mind a conventional house with the usual complement of windows, the usual disposition of rooms. But once you discard preconceived notions, you will find that the actual size of a lot is comparatively unimportant. What counts is the way you use it. For even in the city. you can create your own environment, as architect Ralph Anderson did with the house he built for himself near downtown Houston, Texas.

Tired of driving back and forth from his parents' suburban home to his downtown office, Mr. Anderson chose an old, well- established residential area convenient both to his office and his friends. The only available lot was a 50-foot-wide side lawn of an existing house, and the usable space was further diminished by setback requirements. Nevertheless, Mr. Anderson's house enjoys utter privacy, quiet and a sense of openness and space that belies its actual 1,592 square feet.

The architect accomplished this by turning his back on the outside world and creating a satisfying inner world in a house that encloses its own outdoor landscape. For it wraps around a central courtyard where lush and varied plants rise around a trio of stately oak trees that Mr. Anderson was determined to save, and did. Although the outer walls of the house are windowless on three sides, inner walls of glass join all the major areas to the central courtyard so that the house seems wide open to the outdoors.

Three of the opaque walls are brick, but the front of the house is sheathed with plywood panels faced with strips of natural fir in a grille-like pattern that forms a light-looking, inviting façade. On the inside, the brick of the two longer walls was left exposed, and the courtyard's one opaque wall was faced with the same decorative plywood as the house front, so that indoors and outdoors would be visually related.

The interior a simple rectangle surrounding an almost square center-affords wide-angled vistas into and through the glass-walled courtyard and down the long galleries at its sides. At the front of the house is the living-dining area and the kitchen which is like a three-walled alcove within the larger space. From there, galleries leading past the courtyard terminate in double doors to the bedroom area at the back of the house. Screened by the courtyard's opaque wall, these rooms have complete privacy.