Inside This Austin Home Where the Interiors Are Equal Parts Personal and Museum Worthy

Beauty and resilience, family and provocation, power and femininity—the walls of Suzanne McFayden’s newest home tell the story of a life’s evolution. “I’ve been a daughter and student, a wife and mother,” she says. “Now, I’m an empty-nester.” With her youngest child graduating from college this past spring, the Jamaican-born writer, philanthropist, and prolific contemporary art collector is ready for change. “This is my third act,” she says, reveling in the possibilities. “I’m excited to see what happens next.” Tranquil reflection redefined her idea of home. After selling her 7,000-square-foot Brutalist concrete house in Austin, Texas—featured by Architectural Digest in 2020—McFayden sought “something cozy and nourishing,” she says, “with wall space for art.” She found her “sleeping beauty” tucked into a verdant thicket of Red Oak and Live Oak trees in Austin’s Hill Country. To bring the project to life, she reunited with local architect Paul Lamb and New York City–based interior designer Jennifer Vaughn Miller, the team behind her previous industrial monolith. “The room is the beginning of architecture,” Lamb says, quoting the legendary 20th-century American architect Louis Kahn. This philosophy—that true design happens from the inside out, conceived not as a massive external shell but as a harmonious, thoughtful “society of rooms”—became the guiding principle. “Suzanne has a proclivity for minimalism,” Lamb says. He encouraged her to layer the space with pieces that reflected her passions and honored her ambitions. Working together, Lamb and McFayden—the former board chair of the Blanton Museum of Art and a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem—pored over McFayden’s extensive collection, a compendium of soul-driven acquisitions that reflect her multi-layered identity as a Black woman, mother, immigrant, and survivor. “It wasn’t until I went to Art Basel (in Switzerland) in 2010 that art became personal. I saw myself represented—unlike what I learned in art survey courses at Cornell, where the art was so external to all I am,” McFayden says. The artwork they ultimately selected, she says, “is an extension of how I’m feeling and who I am.” Every room tells a story. In the light-filled foyer—or the “Hall of Ancestors,” as Lamb calls it—Frida Orupabo’s angelic Woman Flying II / Birdy seems to levitate above a Senegalese tribal chair and a vintage Noguchi light sculpture. “The challenge was to create a warm, inviting residence, rich in texture and color, that didn’t compete with the art,” says Vaughn Miller. Her palette featured natural greens—ranging from emerald to olive—woven throughout the upholstery. Ivory-colored custom rugs and shearling pillows provide a soft contrast to the cool white-oak flooring, while rose mohair and crimson velvet add depth and multidimensional texture. “The idea was to bring the outdoors in, creating a calming canvas with colors authentic to the landscape,” she says. The design set the stage for much of the art, but specific works ultimately dictated the room’s design. One of the most significant pieces to consider was the colossal Ebony G. Patterson diptych, which now anchors McFayden’s upstairs study. A vintage Gio Ponti desk is positioned diagonally from the entrance, with the seat angled to face Paul Anthony Smith’s A Sense of Familiar, installed above a Pierre Augustin Rose sofa. The Haas Brothers Wooly Nelson chair, which straddles the divide between functional seating and contemporary sculpture, adds warmth and whimsy. The ethereal mood shifts in the powder room, evoking a sultry underground disco. Here, a vintage brass, nickel, and glass orb casts moody light on Carrie Mae Weems’s Portrait of a Woman Fallen from Grace and Simon Haas’s voyeuristic Padam Padam from his celebrated glory-hole Grottos series. In the media room, McFayden’s desire for “a wall that represents Black joy” comes to life. Lamb designed a seamless, black-on-black ceramic structure sealed with brown mortar—an installation that draws the gaze upward while reflecting light, momentum, and ebullience. The residence, like its owner, is both strong and feminine. “Feeling is first,” Lamb says. “There are no rules; there is no syntax.” This philosophy mirrors McFayden’s internal landscape. In the guest bedroom, conceptual artist and Black feminist Lorraine O’Grady’s The Fir-Palm hangs. This surreal photomontage, a hybrid of a Caribbean palm tree and a New England fir that grows from a woman’s torso, challenges the rigidity of a binary world with a fluid, inclusive identity. “This is me,” McFayden explains. “This says, ‘I exist.’”