The Texas Hill Country, with its limestone rubble, scruffy live oak trees and occasional patches of prickly pear cactus, are some of Sara Story’s best childhood memories, from trips with her family to her parents’ weekend cabin in Kerr County.
It’s what she and her husband of 18 years, New York financier Kenneth Garschina, have created for their own children at SK Ranch, a complex of buildings that include their vacation home, a guest house, pool/fitness pavilion and a tennis pavilion on some 500 acres near Center Point.
With chunky walls of Texas Lueders limestone, the buildings, finished in 2010, look as if they sprang organically out of the ground in an orderly fashion.
The dog-run style patio outside the main house is guarded by a massive live oak tree with gangly limbs that sprawl in every direction. Not far away are shrubby clumps of prickly pear, its thorny pads daring you not to get too close, and across from the pool and fitness pavilion is a field of showy Mexican hat wildflowers dancing in the hilltop breeze.
“My dad had a rustic cabin and my two sisters and I would hike all day and play outside,” said Story, who grew up in Houston and graduated from Memorial High School before heading to California for college. “We would be out all day on the land and crawl into crevices and caves and run through beautiful tall grasses. We’d find arrowheads all over the place. It was like being in the wild. It was perfect childhood play, outside in nature.”
“I wanted that for my kids, and to just be around Texas. There’s a beautiful quality to people who are in Texas, and I want them to be exposed to that,” she said of sons 15-year-old Duke and 11-year-old Edward and her daughter, 9-year-old Dagny. “My kids absolutely love it. It’s their happy place. My boys go to Camp Longhorn in Texas and are always excited to go for spring break or long weekends.”
It’s Story’s happy place, too, where she created a modern ranch with plenty of space for her family and friends, with enough to consider it their own little resort, with a pool, tennis courts, wine cellar, play areas and great big views from every window of every building.
It earned Story major attention, including a feature in Architectural Digest in 2014. That same year, her architect — Brian Korte, then of Lake/Flato Architects Flato and now a partner at Clayton & Little in San Antonio — was recognized with a Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects and the home was a finalist in Interior Design magazine’s prestigious Best of Year competition.
On her own growing resume, Story adds a new entry this month: hardware designer. She’ll debut a collection of drawer pulls and cabinet knobs in an organic Bauhaus style she describes as a juxtaposition of machine age and nature, “like New York and Texas joining together.” The collection is named Center Point, after the West Texas town nearest her vacation home.
Already she has two wallpaper collections with spare but playful designs, most inspired by scenes or objects gathered in her world travels. Lately she’s taken a pass on her most unusual pastime — championship elephant polo — but supports her father’s passion for elephant conservation and protection efforts in Asia.
Texas influence
Story’s influences come from all over the world. Though she grew up in Houston, her energy-executive father — Edward T. Story, now president and CEO of London-based SOCO International — took his family all over the world. She was born in Japan and lived in Singapore until she was 5 or 6 years old. The youngest of three sisters, Story traveled throughout Asia and Europe as a child, nurturing her love of other cultures, architecture and design.
“It’s always been in my life and now it’s in my kids’ lives,” said Story, who earned a bachelor of fine arts from the University of San Diego and then a degree in interior architecture from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Story then went to work for famed designer Victoria Hagen in New York and struck out on her own in 2003, just as she and her husband were starting their family. In the past decade she’s taken her workload up a notch, staffing an office in Chelsea, not far from their Gramercy Park home in Manhattan.
“After we got married I took my husband to the Texas Hill Country because my dad has a ranch there — it’s a nicer house than the cabin we used to visit — and he fell in love with it,” she said. “We always went there for long weekends and holidays, and we thought it would be a perfect balance to living in New York City.”
That was the challenge handed to Korte when he drove to the Kerr County property and stood atop an 8-acre mesa shaped like a boomerang, where pieces of the compound would be situated.
“She’s a sophisticated gal. We were thinking this is a modern ranch house, per se, and address it like you’re living on a ranch. She quickly corrected that,” Korte said. “She said she wanted the feel of a French Country home in Texas to give her kids a contrast that she had when she was growing up. She got it. The kids have complete immersion in the outdoors when they’re there.”
Story originally wanted the property’s four structures — the main house, a guest retreat with a wine cellar, tennis pavilion and the pool/fitness pavilion, all together about 8,000 square feet of living space — closer together. Korte convinced her to set them apart, each its own destination.
The main home and guest house aren’t too far apart, but the pool and tennis are a short walk.
“The views are all different, which is nice,” Korte said. “The tennis court is kind of sunken to keep you out of the wind, but the pool has beautiful vistas to the north. You can see her dad’s house from there, and at night you can see twinkling lights, and that’s Kerrville.”
Materials were important to Korte’s work, tapping into native stone — Lueder’s limestone — in one form or another in each structure. It’s found in big blocks for some exterior walls, with veneers of it inside, too.
“Inside it’s honed to be soft and smooth and have a lot of depth, colorwise,” Korte said. “It has the modern vibe Sara was hoping to have, but also shade is a huge commodity out here in the summer. To get enough cover so they can enjoy these spaces is really critical.”
What Korte likes most is how livable the home is.
“I’m happy that whenever I visit there, I see it being used. Sometimes you see these houses that are so pristine, and they never change,” he said. “You walk in and see kids’ bikes everywhere and toys strewn around in their wing. She changes how she curates her art collection and adds new pieces of furniture here. And I can see how happy they are in it.”
Style and design
Story said that she and her husband had rented a home in Provence and loved the lifestyle there. It was dry and had big, beautiful trees, lots of stone and concrete. She had photos of homes she loved, and they featured steel windows and doors, which she also saw in abundance in France.
“We were not trying to recreate a house in France — we weren’t going toward a chateau,” she said. “And we wanted a comfortable place that was welcoming for our family.”
Old friends from Houston or elsewhere visit, and her kids bring their own friends with them, too.
“A lot of times, I never even leave the property. I hike in the morning, play tennis or games or puzzles,” Story said of the place she and her family visit at least six times a year. “The days are long, and the sunsets are beautiful. It’s where my husband feels the best too, which is nice considering he’s from New York.”
Inside, the home is filled with modern furnishings and contemporary art, a stark contrast from her more traditional home in Gramercy Park, where the family lives in an 1800s townhouse with dramatic mouldings and casings.
“The two homes are totally different,” she said. “The Texas house is more austere, and the Gramercy Park house is fancier and, in some ways, more traditional. The furniture reflects the architecture, and New York being more formal, the materiality is more formal.”
While Story likes a soft and restful palette in a master bedroom — hers in Texas has suede panels on the wall in a soft neutral palette — but her children’s rooms are more playful. There’s a bunk room in black and white with a bright green chair at a writing desk, and her daughter’s room has sweet wallpaper with butterflies and a bold floral patterned chair in a corner. The kids’ play room is black and white and neutral, but a canary yellow sofa and chairs around a game table bring in a bolt of sunshine.
The big main living area with a living room and dining room are Sara’s favorite place in the home, because it’s large enough for everyone to gather. An oversized sectional sofa and a pair of vintage Rene Gabriel chairs sit in front of a dramatic fireplace wall, the lower part covered in blackened steel and the top covered with unusual panels of broken eggshells.
At the other end of the room is the formal dining area, with a table Story designed herself, a rectangle of light oak capped with slices of veiny onyx and surrounded by vintage Jacques Adnet leather chairs.
The cozier kitchen has a long island and a seating area with a banquette, marble-topped table and vintage chairs. The long expanse of windows in this room are covered in beautiful louvres that filter light, an architectural touch borrowed from a home they visited in Provence.
And in every room you’ll find pieces from the couple’s growing collection of contemporary art, including pieces by Yoshitomo Nara, Neo Rauch, Sarah Lucas, Kati Heck and Cecily Brown.
“I love to collect art and learn about art and artists,” said Story, who is on the board of Ballroom Marfa, a West Texas contemporary art space. “I love to be at museums and galleries. It’s a huge passion and influence.”
Nod to nature
The Texas-France connection extends outdoors, too, with story asking for a focus on the native landscape with a little of Provence added in.
Tary Arterburn, principal at Dallas-based Studio Outside Landscape Architects, said his task included helping map the drive up a hill and through the compound to the main house and plan what people see along the way.
“It’s important to make a less engineered approach, a more romantic drive as you go up the hill,” he said. “I know it sounds goofy, but it’s important to lay out the roads and driveway to be sinuous and interesting.”
To the prickly pear, little blue stem grasses and homestead verbena that grow naturally there, Arterburn added buffalo grass, Russian sage and some lavender. Peach trees grow well in the Hill Country, so Story now has a small orchard there, too.
Arterburn also suggested the same kind of maintenance some farmers use: controlled burns.
“Recently we recommended they burn some areas on the mesa because we find, in parts of Texas, if you’re trying to maintain a native landscape, it improves it to burn it every three years. It invigorates new growth and releases seeds that only get released in a fire,” Arterburn said. “They did it two months ago, and it should look fantastic now. Two months after a burn you have no idea that it happened.”
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