Day Trips: The Boot House and Cowboy Hat House, Huntsville

The Boot House and Cowboy Hat House either greet visitors to Huntsville arriving from the west on Texas Highway 30 with a tip of the hat, or give them the boot as they leave town.

The two conspicuous houses are the handiwork of the late Dan Phillips, who died Dec. 21, 2021, at age 76. For more than 20 years, Phillips and his wife, Marsha, had a construction company specializing in building low-cost housing using recycled materials and training construction workers.

Of the more than 20 houses that the Colorado native built, he estimated that 85% of the materials came from detritus from other construction companies destined for the landfill. Wine corks went into flooring, ceramic tile scraps created mosaic walls, and old license plates were used for roofing.

Inspired by the story of an old woman who lived in a shoe, the Boot House was completed in 2016. Most of the living space is in a 711-square-foot bungalow attached to the boot. A spiral staircase climbs 35 feet to a rooftop deck.

Next door, a white cowboy hat covers a small house. The crown of the hat provides a rooftop deck to watch the traffic on downtown Huntsville’s main east-west thoroughfare.

By all accounts Dan Phillips was a Renaissance man who spent a life well lived. According to John Nova Lomax in a thoughtful remembrance in the January 2022 Texas Highways magazine, the Eagle Scout was also a champion bull rider as a teenager, an Army intelligence officer, inventor of a word game called “Brainsqueeze,” a talented woodworker, a dance teacher at Sam Houston State University for a decade, an author, and a beloved husband and father.

The Boot House and Cowboy Hat House are in the 2600 block of West 11th Street a short distance east of Interstate 45. Both are private residences, so please respect the homeowners’ privacy.

1,719th in a series. Everywhere is a day trip from somewhere: Follow “Day Trips & Beyond,” a travel blog, ataustinchronicle.com/daily/travel.