GRAPHĒ: Construction Diary: How a Chocolate Bar Inspired This Austin Architect’s Hill Country Home

"We opted to do a modular system where everything is the same," says Miguel Rivera. "This is what we call a Hershey bar—you know, with the grid of small rectangles? We used six-foot modules."

Constructed primarily of dark steel and glass, the simple, rectangular form blends seamlessly with its surroundings.

Architect Miguel Rivera, his wife, and their two teenage daughters enjoy living in Austin for the easy proximity to restaurants, art galleries, and the downtown core—but over time, the couple started looking for something different. "We’ve always liked the outdoors, the countryside," says Miguel, who grew up in Puerto Rico, noting that his wife, who is from Colombia, spent her childhood summers on her grandparents’ dairy farm. "We were thinking it would be nice to have a piece of property where we could escape the city and be away from the noise, from the cars, from everything."

Architect Miguel Rivera sited his Texas Hill Country weekend house on the highest point of a 25-acre plot, strategically avoiding the surrounding oak trees.
Photo: Casey Dunn

The caveat was that it had to be less than an hour away from their home in Austin. "For me, driving over an hour is like going to the moon," Miguel says. "I would never go."

He and his wife started looking at properties in Texas Hill Country, but the first two they toured weren’t quite right. One was too loud—you could hear noise from the cars passing on the road—and the other had access issues. Around this time, Miguel’s firm, Miró Rivera Architects, was hired to design a house on 64 acres about 50 minutes outside of Austin.

"One day the client said to me, ‘I don’t need all this land. Why don’t you buy some of it?’" Miguel recalls. "We made kind of an exchange and decided we could build two houses, one for him and one for me. It’s kind of remote and expensive to bring people in to work, so we thought we could share those costs."