All around architect Hoang Dang’s suburban Texas house you see roadrunners and turkey buzzards, swallows and cardinals, prairie grasses, and yellow and purple wildflowers. Plus, dozens upon dozens of empty homes and abandoned construction sites.
“When we bought the lot in 1999, there were only a few houses here,” Dang says.
After he designed and built the house for his wife, Thao, in 2001, a building boom hit the Cedar Hill, Texas, neighborhood. Then the mortgage crisis struck and brutally swept through their subdivision.
“I think I noticed (a problem) when a lot of the people in the houses just kind of left in the middle of construction and the homes stayed there, not moving,” he says.
George Roddy, president and owner of Foreclosure Listing Service, says that the neighborhood “is probably one of the top five areas as far as loss of value in Dallas County and probably in the metro area.
“It’s an interesting study, that area,” he says. “They have been hit awfully hard.”
Judging from the rows of empty houses and vacant lots on the Dangs’ street alone, Roddy isn’t exaggerating.
A contemporary oasis
“It’s weird, it really is,” he says. “There have been some people who just walked away.”
The Dangs have not been affected by the economy’s downturn, and they still love where they live.
Besides the fact that their front lawn is not sprouting weeds and a for-sale sign, the family’s house stands out because it is the only contemporary structure for miles around.
Big and rectangular, built with concrete masonry units and custom, steel-framed windows, the Dang residence is an imposing structure from the outside, but that was part of the plan.
“The facade is solid out front because it’s facing south and I wanted to minimize that harsh light,” Dang says.
Inside, he designed the open floor plan to capture the soft, northern light that floods from the glass and steel 18-foot-tall window that is the house’s interior focal point.
Dang studied architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and is partner and director of design at 5G Studio Collaborative, a Dallas firm that designs commercial and residential projects along with furniture. He says he is most influenced by 1930s modernist Le Corbusier.
He incorporated three of Le Corbusier’s five architectural tenets into the design with the expansive, open floor plan; a free facade (found in the giant window wall that is unencumbered by structural columns); and the piece de resistance, the roof garden.
On the third floor you’ll find a small sitting room that looks out on Cedar Hill’s rolling topography and Joe Pool Lake. Dang has decked a small portion of his flat roof (it actually slopes slightly to allow for water runoff), but the entire surface could be decked or planted with grass or ground cover.
“I planned to put a putting green here; it’s designed to take the load so it can be a green roof,” Dang explains.
Throughout the house, there are other surprises: niches tucked in walls for art displays, odd skylights that let sun into dark hallways, curved walls that define space. Even the hallway from the second-floor overlook was designed with care.
“It’s a forced perspective,” Dang says of the hallway, which becomes progressively narrower moving toward the three upstairs bedrooms. “These are the private areas of the house, so I wanted to close them off a little. Notice the hallway to the master (bedroom) actually gets wider — to let in more light.”
Other unusual features include doors that swivel; a tornado-safe room that can be accessed from both the first and second floors; and a “flex” room that could be used as a game room, artist’s studio or media room.
Another surprise: the bursts of neon color the Dangs have painted throughout their mostly white interior.
One of the most charming features is the balcony from their son’s room that opens up to the living area.
“This way the space flows through the second floor to merge with the first floor,” Dang says.
All the rooms in the house were designed to close off for privacy, but they also can open to become part of the larger, overall experience.
Waiting for change
The Dangs recently considered selling the house. With all the amenities and custom details, the house probably would have garnered a lot of interest — in any other market. For now, the couple has decided to wait out the mortgage crisis.
They have purchased a second lot on a hillside in the same Cedar Hill subdivision and hope to build on it one day.
“I’d take my house and scale it down,” Dang says. “But my wife will probably have a say in it.”
For now, the Dangs, in one of the few inhabited structures on the street, feel the place is home sweet home enough, given the current housing downturn.
“I hope (the neighborhood) will be fully built out (and that it’s just) a matter of time,” Dang says. “That’s why we’re sticking around.”
