Escape to the fantastical Bloomhouse in the hills of West Austin

Situated on a secluded lot and wonderfully restored by new owners Austinites Dave and Susan Claunch, the Bloomhouse is a celebration of all things wonderful and whimsical.

Fairytale setting for a magical home

The word magical is used with too much frequency from the mouths of real estate hawkers everywhere. Very few places in this world are truly magical. Yet, the location for the Bloomhouse in the 1970s was one of those places that delivered on the hype. Hippies of all stripes were drawn to the hills west of Austin for its rugged beauty and relative isolation just outside of the Austin city limits. Into that setting came an idealistic UT architectural graduate student, Charles Harker, and a man with a mission, Dalton Bloom, to build a home away from society that would be a monument to the idea of craftsmanship and ecological living immersed in nature.

The goal was a home that would not only protect you from the elements but allow you to live in harmony with the environment. This quixotic vision meant to provide the home dweller a place apart, a palace of peace, a place at one with nature, a place so removed and separate that for many years there was no address, just a location.

And then the hippie dream disappeared into the 1980s Austin real estate boom, like so much pot smoke wafting away into the hot Central Texas breeze. And there in the hills, the Bloomhouse waited. It would need just the right person who could see the home’s potential to bring this work of art back from the brink.

Bloomhouse Reborn

And then the home’s fortunes shifted on a chance event. In 2017 Dave Claunch , owner of Liaison Creative+Marketing (and a former mayor of West Lake Hills, Texas ,) saw a real estate ad fall out of an Austin Business Journal for the Bloomhouse, a house that he had learned about during his time as Mayor. Claunch was struck with a mission at that moment to save and preserve this one-of-a-kind house. Since buying the home, Claunch has spent almost a year meticulously restoring the home with period details considered and included.

It’s an adventure

When you drive away from the shores of the Lake Austin heading through West Lake, you are not certain where you are headed but you know it’s up. Up, up, up, and up the high road. The Bloomhouse is literally located off of a road called High Road. With unbelievable views of downtown Austin receding in your rearview mirror, you find the side street where the house awaits in a clearing in the woods.

Happily Ever After

Bumping along the gravel road, you see her, the fantastical beast in the clearing and you laugh out loud at the ridiculousness, the joy, the sheer courage of a house built to please. Is it a white wolf in the clearing? A merengue sculpture? A mirage? You appear to have entered another planet’s architectural heritage.

When you stay at the Bloomhouse, you are entering a setting where magic can and should happen. Without one straight line or corner in the entire structure, your thoughts are free of the constraints that our angular world creates. At the Bloomhouse, we have left behind the place of modernity, the place of logic, we are living in whimsy. We are alive in a fairy tale of our own making. Let the story begin.