When a couple with two children left Los Angeles for the limestone hills of Texas, they wanted something new that still felt familiar. “The clients wanted a uniquely sophisticated and modern home that reminded them of the things they liked about their previous life in Los Angeles but capitalized on the unique beauty and terrain of the Texas Hill Country,” says Joshua Rice, founder of Joshua Rice Design, who led the interiors.
The site did most of the talking. Set on a ridge where the land falls into a wide canopy of oak and cedar, the house was designed by architect Carlton Graham of Graham Architecture, whose San Antonio roots met his California practice to shape something distinctly regional. “The architecture uses long horizontal lines that echo the horizon, and the interiors follow the same approach,” Rice explains. Visitors arrive by a long wood boardwalk through native brush, past gravel and water, to a limestone façade and a towering pivot door, a slow reveal rather than a grand announcement.
Inside, restraint does the heavy lifting. “One of the ideas that guided the interiors was to treat the landscape almost like a continuous backdrop,” Rice says. Warm whites, plaster and natural oak flooring frame millwork that shifts between light oak, fumed elm and walnut. “Much of the house uses restrained materials such as limestone and travertine, chosen specifically for their softness and minimal movement,” he says, reserving a darker quartzite for the living room and wine room, where deep browns and blacks introduce quiet drama. “The materials were chosen less for spectacle and more for their ability to age well and feel appropriate to the setting.”
The house’s most soul stirring moment floats above the dining room, where eighteen ceramic sculptures by French artist Denis Castaing scale a two story wall, a piece Rice initiated after seeing Castaing’s smaller works years earlier in a museum in Nevers, France. “The individual pieces give the wall presence without feeling heavy, and the composition reads almost like a suspended landscape across the upper level,” he says. Below, a sleek Bulthaup kitchen, the only millwork not designed in house, flows straight into dining and living.
Almost everything else, the cabinetry, the paneling, the built ins, was custom drawn for this one address. “As a designer, a project like this required a lot of custom work to keep the interiors feeling cohesive with the scale of the architecture,” Rice explains. Five years in the making, much of it slowed by geography. “The house required an unusually high level of detail and coordination,” he says. “One of the greatest challenges was the limited availability of specialized trades and craftspeople in the immediate area.” What emerged, in Rice’s words, “brings together modern architecture and a disciplined interior palette to create spaces that feel expansive and refined, yet grounded in the landscape that surrounds them.”
