Behind every home with a sense of purpose and perspective is a team of talented people, working from initial sketches towards the final finished result. For this unique property, situated deep in the countryside of Texas’s Washington County, the team members—interior designer Shannon Bowers (MILIEU’s Editor-at-Large and a Dallas-based interior designer), architect Jeremy Corkern and landscape architect Ryan Cole—formed a bond so strong that the homeowners knew at inception that what they wanted for their house would be fully realized by these three experts at their craft.

“What I discovered right away,” says the homeowner husband, who lives with his wife and two college-aged sons fulltime in Houston, “is that Shannon, Jeremy, and Ryan were unlike any other team I’ve worked with. They were rock stars! They loved working together—so organized, with a desire for the actual building of the house to be something fun.” Bowers concurs by adding, “The story of this house is about a team coming together and taking raw materials of the land and creating something beautiful, durable, and well appointed.”

All three of the principal designers bonded, too, not only over their joint mission to create a novel home in a dramatic setting, but also because each of them was, as Corkern says, “a little out of our comfort zones.” For Corkern, it meant designing a type of house he had never before created. For Cole, it required, as he says from his Baton Rouge studio, “wanting to create a narrative with the landscaping in which this could be seen as an old property that has been rediscovered, when, in fact, it’s all new, yet has the feel of history to it.” And for Bowers, it was about responding to a house meant to be rustic, where the family could “get their boots dirty outside” but still feel comfortable inside the home, in softer—even feminine—rooms and spaces.

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INTERIOR DESIGN BY SHANNON BOWERS

ARCHITECTURE BY JEREMY CORKERN

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE BY RYAN COLE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRETT WOOD

WRITTEN BY DAVID MASELLO

This story appeared in the Fall 2026 issue of MILIEU.