November 15

 

Christopher Travis

By Talk Design

November 15, 2021


Christopher K. Travis is the founder and lead designer for Truehome Design.Build. He designed and built a broad variety of residential and historic projects in Texas from 1995 to 2014, including high-end new homes, ranches and estates, major remodeling, historic restoration and adaptive re-use of historic structures, historic and light commercial projects.

From 1995 until 2013, Travis was the founder, lead designer and Managing Partner of Sentient Architecture, LLC, (Formerly Round Top Architecture). He partnered with commercial architect, Robert Brett Pitt, in that enterprise serving the rural areas of South Central Texas and the Austin, Texas environs. In 2013, the partners formed individual enterprises and Travis moved his design practice into Truehome Design.Build.

Travis is an expert on the adaptive re-use of period materials and artifacts, as well as human factors based architectural programming for residential projects. He is the author of the Truehome Workshop and the originator of that systematic process which he has used with clients for over eighteen years.

One of his projects was awarded a T. C. Jester award for excellence in historic design in the historic Houston Heights. Mr. Travis’ company was named Remodeler of the Year by the Greater Houston Builder’s Association. He is also an expert on designing and building projects on remote sites and in rural areas.

His projects have appeared in the New York TimesBuilder magazine, Country LivingCowboys and IndiansHome CompanionSun Coast MagazineGo Magazine (Airtran Airways flight magazine), Hommes Magazine in Greece; the San Antonio Express News, the Marin County Independent Journal, The Providence Sunday Journal, in Texas Highways and before employee groups at Microsoft and Google. Major stories on his approach have appeared twice in German publications and in the Netherlands and Australia.

Mr. Travis is also a writer and theorist who has a multi-disciplinary interest in how psychological techniques, and human factors findings, can be applied to architecture and residential design to more effectively create homes and living environments that “fit the psychological nature of people” .He studies and applies the possibility of therapeutic architecture in his design practice. It is this long term study that inspired both the last twenty years of his design practice and the Truehome Workshop. He believes the psychological and emotional needs of the inhabitants of a home should guide the work of designers, and has used his systematic method for that purpose with his clients since 1998, and exclusively since 2002.

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