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Jensen Ackles’s Lake Austin home abounds in great style with wry touches

CW star’s house not your typical ‘Texas Tuscan’

The Ackles living room Jeff Wilson/Courtesy of Architectural Digest

If you’re not into big, Mediterranean-style McMansions, shopping for a lakeside luxury home in Austin can be tricky. For CW Supernatural star Jensen Ackles and his wife, actor Danneel Ackles, the experience was no different. According to an ArchDigest exclusive, when the couple was relocating from Los Angeles, they were presented with an array of homes Danneel calls “Texas Tuscan”—not suitable for creative folks who want bespoke surroundings.

Nevertheless, the Ackles found a home in the area that, while vaguely in the same style, was less grand than most and ready for a renovation. After procuring the home (which was not on the market but had a persuadable seller), the couple, along with local design stars Fern Santini and Paul Lamb, proceeded to do just that.

The result is a personalized, eccentric, but highly livable homage to both late-1960s California (a Laurel Canyon bungalow the couple had once lived in) and an old-school, Austin-style lake house, bound together thematically by the reason so many people choose to live and work in Austin: music.

Jeff Wilson/AD

The home also features the kinds of eccentric and eclectic objects—some useful, some decorative, some both—that could be found in abundance in Austin during its bohemian period, as well as in late-60s California, an aesthetic that was also a big influence on the remodel. It’s both the “free-style, Austin lake house” Lamb calls it in AD and what Santini described as “a cross between Joni Mitchell and the Serge Gainsbourg-Jane Birkin thing that was going on in Paris at the same time. It’s very hip, but it’s low-key.” Sounds like the perfect vibe for their new locale.

Jeff Wilson/AD

CW Star Jensen Ackles Invites AD Inside His Family Home in Austin [ArchDigest]