“Worth the wait!” a woman called to me reassuringly while I stood in line to wander through a Craftsman bungalow in Travis Heights. Once inside, admiring repurposed shiplap and curved furniture, I couldn’t help but agree with her. The residences on Preservation Austin’s 2026 Homes Tour have had no problem waiting for their moment in the spotlight, carefully tended to by historically minded stewards who opened their doors to tourgoers last weekend.
On my self-guided journey across the city, I admired refashioned guitar-fret door handles and cooed at backyard chickens in a thoughtfully expanded Montopolis board-and-batten cabin and enviously gawked at midcentury furnishings and a Shoal Creek ravine view in a West University apartment designed by modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Walking through historic homes is a combination of unbelievably intimate window shopping and a local history lesson.
The exercise tugs on our deep desire to connect objects with identity, a sense of nosy, consumerist glee and a curiosity about times gone by. Having thus lured us through the front door, the preservation organization delivered an education that dug deeper into both the city’s diverse past and the architects, designers, and humble builders that have puzzled over questions of growth since long before our current quandaries.
“I wish that the original architect was still alive because we kept a lot of it,” Robin Chaney told me Sunday as strangers donning blue plastic booties waddled through her midcentury University Hills house. She pointed to a framed article from 1967’s Parade of Homes, detailing the floor plan and materials used in the original design. Though she and her husband are the residence’s 10th owners, the initial layout has stayed consistent. The couple used the article’s notes as a guide for their own renovations, doubling down on the exposed cedar and natural lighting. “Things like that, I just really have treasured – the longer we’ve lived here, the more I’ve enjoyed it,” Chaney said.
Many of us, like Chaney, are drawn to old homes by an admiration for specific architectural trends or, more generally, an appreciation for intentional construction – which often pairs with a feeling that quickly constructed, cookie-cutter new builds lack a deliberate aesthetic.
Delwood Duplexes, one of Saturday’s stops, remind us of imaginative approaches to mass development. Constructed in 1948 for returning servicemen and their families in Cherrywood, which was then a suburb, the 77 concrete-block shared-family residences are “sturdy, still, and enduring,” according to the tour program. Built in similar stuccoed forms, colorful hues and distinct porch configurations distinguish the minimal, traditional-style buildings with bohemian flair. At the unit included in the tour, a repurposed gumball dispenser playfully accentuated the structure’s candy-colored exterior. Inside, distinct touches, like peekaboo built-in shelving, gave the two-story rental a splash of panache.
Not all of the tour’s iconic residences were single-family houses. Across the interstate on aptly named Cliff Street, a two-bedroom apartment commissioned by Shakespeare scholar Dr. Thomas Mabry Cranfill for his life partner, the photographer and author Hans Beacham, displayed a clever approach to small spaces with a lofted primary bedroom and a hallway office all bathed in natural light from two-story windows.
Everything isn’t always bigger in Texas; maximizing tight spaces has long been important in Austin. In Montopolis, a lineage of homeowners have maintained and renovated a 244-square-foot single-bedroom cabin into a still-compact 420-square-foot residence. The pink-painted house, constructed in 1940, was part of Burditt Prairie, a freedom community established by Black Austinites after emancipation. The building’s current proprietor, Americana songwriter Amy Annelle, has traced the history of the land through deed records and the memories of her neighbors, some of whom still remember original dwellers Elizabeth and William Casmer.
“They very graciously shared their memories and their stories,” said Annelle, who has compiled her neighbors’ oral histories to add to ongoing efforts to memorialize the neighborhood’s rich history. “I am blessed to have this home and to call it my home.”
A historic homes tour has a certain connotation – and while I absolutely strolled through several impressive and expensive, well-decorated houses, Preservation Austin is tapping into a broader and more exhaustive story of the city. Reaching into the patchwork neighborhoods that give Austin its personality, and tapping into the builders and residents that have crafted its colorful present, the tour was a welcome reminder that history happens in every ZIP code and tax bracket.
This article appears in April 24 • 2026.
