The Sand Dollar House Outside of Austin Lists for $1.99 Million

In Texas, a circular, lakeside home with a roof that looks like a sand dollar is hitting the market for $1.99 million. Located in the city of Lakeway, which is just outside of Austin, the roughly 2,300-square-foot home is perched on a bluff that overlooks Lake Travis.

The sellers are Karena Dawn, co-founder of the fitness brand Tone It Up, and her husband, Bobby Goldstein. The pair came across the home while boating on Lake Travis. When they found out it was for sale, they bought it for an undisclosed price in 2021. “Anyone who has boated on Lake Travis in the last 40 years has looked up at it,” said the listing agent, Michelle Jones of Compass. She shares the listing with her colleague, Todd Grossman. The three-bedroom home is shaped like a cylinder and made of steel and gunite. It is often referred to by locals as “the mushroom house” and was built for an artist in the late 1970s by architect John Covert Watson, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, according to the Old Lakeway Project, a local organization that was put together to document the history of Lakeway’s earliest homes. The gunite roof, which has petal-shaped skylights in a sand-dollar-like formation, extends over the residence’s entrance, which opens to the second floor. Inside, a spiral staircase connects the second-floor living areas with the first-floor bedrooms. When staring up at the ceiling from the staircase, it looks like the inside of a sand dollar, said Dawn. The couple updated the home’s deck but didn’t make any changes to the interior, according to Dawn. “It’s perfectly original and very well maintained,” she said. They used the home as a weekend getaway for about three years before listing it on short-term rental websites like Airbnb for around $1,000 a night, depending on the season. Dawn, an author of two fitness books and a memoir, co-founded Tone It Up in 2009. The company, which has built its community around fitness and women’s health, offers things like recipes, meal plans and workout programs. In 2021, Dawn founded the Big Silence mental-health foundation and podcast.

At her Lake Travis home, Dawn said she enjoyed writing and watching Texas thunderstorms roll over the water. She said they are selling because they are ready to move onto another investment property. The home last hit the market in late 2020 for around $2.2 million, which Jones said was aspirational at the time. The home underwent several price cuts and was asking $1.75 million when Dawn and Goldstein made an offer. Jones said the listing price this time around reflects the area’s home-value growth over the last four years.

In September 2019, the typical home value in Lakeway was estimated to be $518,937, according to the Zillow Home Value Index. In May, the typical home value estimate was just under $782,000.

Write to Libertina Brandt at [email protected]

Source: Wall Street Journal