“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…