"WatersMark is a unique neighborhood in Austin that provides spectacular Texas hill country living in town."
Quiet, private, hidden away on Barton Creek. Narrow lanes curve around trees and follow the natural terrain."
"Dramatic cliffs, stands of oaks and neighboring fairways all require a different approach to architecture."
"To preserve what is here, houses must achieve a delicate balance of scale and drama."
About WatersMark
WatersMark is a beautiful community nestled between the fairways of Barton Creek's Fazio Foothills golf course and the bluffs overlooking Barton Creek. The condominium association owns 73.42 acres that have 65 sites for unique homes that are specifically designed to meet the desires of the homeowners and to blend in with the land. In WatersMark you have the feel of being in the country while being located only minutes from town and within the overall confines of the Barton Creek Country Club and Omni Resort. It is a beautiful location and a wonderful place to live.
The Vision of WatersMark
There are two pieces of WatersMark, one manmade and the other natural. The manmade piece includes the houses, the landscaped areas comprising each yard, and the landscaped common areas. The vision is for 65 individually designed houses, each house unique, expressing the personality of the owner, the houses being small in scale so that they would not overpower the natural landscape; there is a limit on how big houses can be and how tall they can tower. The small house sites limit how far a house can sprawl out. A premium is placed on the talent of the architects used so these houses would be gems, not looking like every other house anywhere else in Austin or Barton Creek. In the manmade portion of WatersMark, each house should be exceptionally unique.
The second piece, the natural landscape, was to be left as it was, wild and wooly. Great care has been taken to destroy as little of the native vegetation as possible. Because the houses are close together the dense hill country vegetation, which includes the cedar trees and scruffy underbrush, provides buffering from your neighbor; it gives each house privacy. The dense natural vegetation also makes for elements of visual surprise. You can round a corner to find a small road leading to several houses that you didn't know were there. You can be driving along, pass of patch of native hill country and find a great house, a gem, hopefully thinking, wow, how did that get there? Maybe that creates a little bit of mystery. Part of that surprise is just getting peeks of houses back in the woods.
The landscaped common areas and individual yards are a middle ground, not wild and wooly, but not looking like the golf course either. There should be mystery here as well. Are they tended and gardened or are they wild? Sometimes that mystery occurs between seasons. Part of the year there might be wildflowers blooming and part of the year it would be natives grasses. In the spring it might look like a garden; in the summer, a native area, a little scruffy. That mystery might also be caused by having a continuously blooming plant in middle of scruffy native areas. Was it planted or is it natural?
We are told that WatersMark has a great "feel." Most people never examine that statement or take the time to figure out why that is true. Our belief is the mix of having the manmade amidst the wild and wooly natural landscape is what gives that "feeling". There is a tension between the manmade and the natural. The better the houses are, the more gem like, the greater that tension becomes, giving Watersmark an even heightened "great feeling." And the more the natural areas are rough the more amazing the diamonds seem.
We think a new twist on the old phase, a diamond in the rough, applies here. That old saying meant you could take the rough part away and have a diamond left or that the rough can be pruned away to make a diamond. It meant getting rid of the rough so that only the diamond is left. The new twist means the diamond is more beautiful when it sits in the rough. The less rough there is the less amazing the diamond seems. The WatersMark ethos should be a new twist on diamond in the rough.
We have to guard that over time two things do not happen. One, the diamonds, the houses, will be altered with little grasp or care for architectural thought and merit. And second that the native areas will be slowly chipped away, a mowed lawn added here and there, the native area trimmed up and made "neat". The tension between the natural and manmade will be diminished one house at a time or one patch of native area at a time.