One of my fondest memories, growing up, was the annual trip to visit my mother’s relatives in rural north Louisiana. “The Liberty Hill Graveyard Working” was held each summer with friends and relatives coming from near and far, overflowing the small country church that sat across the dusty, gravel road from the cemetery. There was ample preaching, lots of hugging, kissing and handshaking, some “You haven’t changed a bit” to “My, how you have grown!”

After services the menfolk and kids worked in the cemetery, clearing family plots of weeds, while the women unloaded from the cars their best culinary efforts onto the seemingly miles of tables snaking beneath the huge oaks on the church grounds. The quantity, quality and diversity of food defies description. The dessert section alone was five feet wide and ten or twelve yards long.

We usually visited for about a week, staying with Uncle Clem and Aunt Jane on their totally self-sufficient farm. The farm had among other things; barns, stables, blacksmith shop, chicken house, turkey house, hog pens, bee hives, goose pond (for the geese which supplied down for pillows and mattresses), a mule-driven cane pulping mill (for sugar and syrup), and the centerpiece – the farm house.

This building was the very essence of architecture. The style was called a “double-pen, dog-trot.” The house was two rectangular log structures placed parallel lengthwise about fifteen feet apart. Each of the log pens was approximately twenty by fifty or sixty feet, with interior log partitions. These three components were under a symmetrical gable roof and the entire structure sat on a masonry perimeter wall with interior piers made from native iron-stone. The floors and twelve foot ceilings were 1” x 12” heart pine planking. Each room had an iron-stone fireplace, except the kitchen which had a VW sized wood-burning range. A shed-roofed porch spanned the entire front gable end. The entire house was shingled with hand-split cypress.

In designing this present day house, an attempt was made to recapture the functional ambiance of that by-gone log home. This basic layout consists of two long “pens” separated by a central hallway (dog-trot) aligned on an east to west axis which runs the length of the structure. The “public” rooms – study, kitchen, dining and living rooms – open into the hall from the right or north side. The bedrooms, baths and laundry are on the left or south side. Two open porches, one on the north and one on the south, span the horizontal length of the house. All rooms, except the kitchen and bathrooms, access the porches via sliding glass doors. The glass doors visually admit the heavily wooded outdoors. Additionally, glass in the gabled ends continue this blending of the inside with the outside.

The house is connected to the artist/owner’s studio with a drive through porte cochere. The galvalume roof and wall coverings were chosen not only for the sharp contrast between the raw metal and natural vegetation, but also for energy efficiency and very low maintenance in Houston’s long, hot, humid summers.

We’ve added a small barn and potting shed of the same exterior material to house the gardening equipment. Mother Nature provided most of the landscaping but we continue to augment this with an emphasis on native and low maintenance plants.