Like many Americans, 2020 brought changes for Aisha Devrouax.
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she decided to relocate from Massachusetts to Austin, Texas, and collocate with her partner — but they needed a house for their family of four.
They searched around the city, eventually finding an option in Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood, a historic area that quilts 19th-century Victorians and Craftsman-era bungalows together with more modern additions. Devrouax and her family settled on the latter, inheriting a laminated article from the home’s sellers indicating “that this is one of the first modern houses they put in,” she said.
Defined by a boxy form and sleek lines, the home was largely hidden behind a 6-foot cement wall the family mostly tore down pretty immediately.
“When we moved in, the wall was around the entire house, so we felt really isolated from the neighborhood,” Devrouax said. “It was like we were living in the fortress.”
A picket fence improved the situation, knitting the residence back into its street and exposing a two-story wall of greenery that had grown up around the home since its construction. People walked their dogs along the ivy, and it felt like an element of their home that “was kind of giving back to the neighborhood,” Devrouax explained.
An exterior wall becomes a canvas
But in 2021, the Great Texas Freeze hit Austin, compromising infrastructure throughout the region and wreaking havoc on individual homes. The wall of greenery didn’t make it through the event, leaving Devrouax and her family with a towering concrete canvas. COVID-era isolation lingered, so the family brainstormed strategies to make the façade “more interesting and … engage a kind of communal experience,” she recalled. Looking to Austin, a city peppered with artwork, for inspiration, the family thought, why not commission a mural?
“We were especially motivated, at that time of really being in your home, by trying to figure out how we could have an expression that was adding something to our community and making us feel more [a] part of that community,” Devrouax said.
Using an online service that connects homeowners with service providers, the family found Dan Terry, a Texas-based artist and muralist with pieces across the country. He’s done a number of these murals on private homes, finding that these large-scale artworks offer owners something specific.
“A mural is a different thing,” Terry said. “In a mural, you can create a space that transports you to a different psychological space.” The artist, whose work is partially framed by a psychology minor from both his master’s and PhD education, often finds clients asking for murals that bring nature into their built spaces. Terry is also attuned to color theory, paying close attention to how specific shades and tones influence emotions, especially given the long lifespan a mural can have.
Calming mural becomes a tour stop
In 2022, Terry put in a bid for the project and talked to the homeowners, who “wanted something contemporary, but they also wanted something that was nature-oriented,” Terry said.
Terry considered the home — with its structured form and gray exterior — and thought, let’s go with a waterfall. “That would fit in with the architecture without being overly strange,” he explained. “I wanted to give it a sense of nature — a calming, relaxing thing that would be desaturated in color and fit into the color scheme of the rest of the structure.”
He sketched up a proposal, adding in a carpet of bluebonnets that Devrouax and her family wanted as something that specifically harkened back to the Texas hill country landscape. After final approvals from the family, the mural was a go.
The scaffolding went up, Terry and an assistant got to work, and, about four days later, Devrouax had a waterfall mural, rendered in durable 100% artist acrylics, spanning one of her exterior walls.
Three years later, the mural offers a kind of landmark for the family and neighborhood; it’s a stop on a bike tour of murals in Austin. It also offers respite, with a burbling fountain the family placed nearby adding a sonic layer to the experience.
“We do see people looking at the mural when they come into the neighborhood or pointing at the mural,” Devrouax said. “When we are sitting outside … it does create opportunities for us to engage with people because it’s approachable.”