It started out as a modest project. A small guest house. A simple casita.
Jimmy Burke has a large family that likes to visit him and his wife, Juli, frequently, and the Burke’s college-age son brings home guests regularly. They needed another guest room.
“Instead of adding on to the house, why don’t we build something in the back yard?” Jimmy suggested to his wife.
Juli took the idea and ran with it. And ran, and ran and ran.
The original concept was one bedroom and a living room with a big TV, a place where the Burkes and their neighbors, all sports fans, could gather to watch football games.
But Juli has always had a creative bent, and she and architect/builder Gary Grossman kept having good ideas — ideas too good not to implement.
A two-story living room with a slate floor and a ceiling-high fireplace would be striking, she thought. And because there was going to be a tall fireplace on the inside of the east wall of the living room, why not have a tall fireplace on the covered patio area outside of the same wall?
If the Burkes and their neighbors were going to be hanging out watching games, they ought to have some sort of space for storing and preparing food, she realized. Chalk up one full kitchen with two ovens, two refrigerator-freezers, a dishwasher and a half, and windows that open up to a 17-foot granite-tile serving bar on the patio.
They wanted a game room: Juli had the idea to use 4-inch squares of end-cut mesquite in which you can see the rings of the tree for an unusual floor. They wanted the game room to hold a regulation-size shuffleboard table, which meant a very large game room.
And then came, perhaps, the best idea of all: a wine cellar. Something dark and cool and rathskellerish. Something capable of holding more than 4,000 bottles of bar-coded wine — because personalized bar-coding on your wine collection is just another idea too good to ignore.
The wine room has a brick exterior, a travertine floor and two gorgeous stone arches. The temperature is kept at 54 degrees, and it’s the kind of place that makes you feel grand just standing there, as if a castle servant might be sent down at any moment to fetch a dozen bottles of wine for a royal dinner.
As the downstairs roughed out, Grossman told the Burkes that they might as well put in two large bedrooms upstairs, instead of the one they’d planned on, because there certainly was going to be enough room. A wraparound upstairs porch completed the plans for the backyard house, which clocked in at 4,200 square feet, several hundred square feet larger than the house the Burkes live in.
“It just got out of hand,” says Juli, looking simultaneously proud and sheepish.
The Burkes no longer refer to their backyard house as “the casita.” That stopped seeming appropriate long ago. It has a new name, an apt name that has stuck: the party house.
It wasn’t Juli Burke or even Jimmy Burke who had the original idea that was too good to ignore. It was their friend Rene Matula.
About 15 years ago, Rene commented one day that the Burkes and the Matulas and other friends ought to buy some acreage together and develop it.
“We all wanted land,”Juli says, “and a little more space to spread out than the typical neighborhood.”
Juli and Jimmy, and Jimmy’s brother, Bob, and Bob’s wife, Lisa, found a 13-acre plot just south of Mansfield, Texas. Jimmy and Juli completed their house about 11 years ago, and Bob built his house next door.
About two years ago, Jimmy’s one-time fraternity brother and current business partner, Jim Mills, and his wife, Vicki, moved into their house on the acreage. And just about a year ago, Jim’s University of Texas Law School buddy Mark Matula, and his wife, Rene, moved into their home, completing the circle of friends.
The party house, the community house, so to speak, was finished in August 2008.
