2200 Scenic Drive

The cliff the house sits in is Austin limestone, and a century and a half ago this stretch of the river is where the city cooked it. William Walsh ran a lime business at the base of Mount Bonnell from the 1860s, cutting juniper on both banks to fire kilns in what is now Tarrytown. In 1871 Peter Calder Taylor, a Scot from the Orkney Islands, built his own kiln a few blocks inland on land he bought for 4,000 dollars, quarried the stone at Taylor Slough, and at peak shipped 50,000 barrels of lime a year by rail, as far as Galveston. His kiln still stands in Reed Park, about half a mile east of Scenic Drive.

The water came later. The city's first dam went in downstream in 1893 and made a lake called McDonald; the flood of April 1900 took the dam with it, a second attempt was abandoned in 1915, and Tom Miller Dam, begun in 1938 and operating by 1940, made the constant-level Lake Austin that is there now. 2200 Scenic Drive is less than a mile upstream of it, and Scenic Drive was still River Road when the first lake houses went up along it in the 1920s.

Specht Harpman, the firm that is now Specht Novak, published the house in 2015 under the name Cliff Dwelling: a 1970s structure on a narrow limestone ridge halfway down the cliff, reached in its first life by an exterior ramp that dropped 25 feet from the street to the front door. The renovation, which the firm dates to 2013, took the ramp away and put an entry pavilion at street level, clad in cumaru and stucco, its parking terrace carried on steel posts set into the rock, with an herb garden on its roof.

From the pavilion a stair, backed by an elevator, descends through three levels, the lake on one side through floor-to-ceiling glass and the cliff face on the other. The floors are white oak salvaged from Boston Harbor piers. The stair treads and counters are peperino, a grey volcanic stone cut at a quarry in Italy the owners visited. The front door is an antique from an Italian farmhouse. A terrace runs the length of the water side, and a covered two-slip boat dock sits at the bottom.

Travis Central Appraisal District carries the parcel as 0.6887 acres, 29,998 square feet, in the D. J. Gilbert survey, market area X1000WF, the district's waterfront class. The dwelling's main area is 6,014 square feet on three floors of 2,772, 2,356 and 886 square feet, with a residential elevator, a 775-square-foot covered terrace, four open decks, an exterior stair and a covered stationary boat dock, under a flat built-up roof on a pier-and-beam foundation. Every improvement line is stamped 2024, the district's date for the latest work. The deed history runs back to a warranty deed of August 1974, and the present owners took title on August 2, 2002.

If you would like to submit your property to The Full Ask, please visit our submissions page. Featured properties are introduced to our community of agents, designers, and buyers who care about well-considered real estate.