- One of the sayings here in Bouldin Creek that I don't hear a lot anymore was, "You couldn't throw a rock without hitting a local artist."

And that's becoming less and less true all the time, as people are being driven out of Austin who are artistic and creative.

So I wanted to make an amazing house, but I also wanted to promote all these people so that they could stay here.

Hi, my name is Joey Trevino.

I bought this house a couple of years ago.

I moved in the day before snowpocalypse, and it was quite an adventure.

I only had a mattress and nothing else in the house.

I thought I had escaped the snowpocalypse, but no.

when I walked into my bedroom on midnight on Friday, I walked into a pool of water.

I spent the next eight months of my life fighting against irrigation problems in this house.

And at the same time, I was starting to remodel it because it was kind of a boring, square, beige house, and that's not my style at all.

And then little by little, I started coming up with ideas for what I wanted for the house.

And luckily, I had some amazing people to really help me with it.

I had multiple goals with it, but first of all, it was to keep Austin weird and to promote the local artist.

The other reason I created the house is I got four grandkids, little ones, they're like babies.

I want them to wake up every morning and go, "Why aren't we at Papa Joey's house?"

(laughing) I wanted it to be whimsical for them.

My overall brain was Nelson Rockwood, he's my general contractor that did the house.

I don't know many general contractors that would've been okay with turning my house into a very large octopus.

I've always been entranced with mermaids, you know, they're just very whimsical creatures.

I thought it would be wonderful to have one.

Rain Lily Design came in and they did all of the landscaping.

I worked with Heidi Choate extensively to kind of figure it all out.

- Some of the main challenges that we had working on this project was just really the shape of the lot just being really narrow.

And especially since his house is down slope, it had taken on a lot of water.

So, just working with the grade and also coming up with a smart drainage plan while not compromising the design.

His vision was he just really wanted this beautiful water feature.

We worked with Dan Johanson, with Focal Point Water Features, and they created this beautiful natural looking water feature in the front yard, sort of a metaphor for all of the issues that Joey was experiencing with all of the water runoff.

That was sort of our inspiration for creating a natural landscape just around that space.

- There's something calming about the water.

I can just sit here and listen to my water feature all day long, and I have people that come over and do the same.

(laughing) It's almost like looking at a fireplace, you know, you just kinda get drawn into it.

I enjoyed their water feature so much that I was like, "Well, I gotta do more of that."

So "(laughing) we reached back out to them and said, "I need another one in the back."

And I was very careful too about the use of water, so one of the things we did is we decided to capture the water that falls on my house.

So all the rain gutters in the house feed into a water tank that I'm sitting on top of right now.

There's a water tank that holds 3,750 gallons of water.

So anytime it rains, water goes into the tank, and then the tank feeds all the water features and the landscape as well.

- So in terms of picking the plants for this landscaping, I really didn't wanna pick anything that would compete with all of the other elements that are going on.

I mean, you have this beautiful mermaid sculpture and a octopus mural that demands your attention.

So, I didn't want anything that would take away your focus from those elements.

My focus was picking a lot of different textures, soothing different shades of green, and pops of color.

Joey really wanted a weeping willow, he loves that look.

And as magical as they are, they don't really love our climate.

So anytime I can promote our native plants, even something as humble as our honey mesquite, we just felt like that was a good choice.

And now, it's really starting to mature and give that look that we want, just kinda cascading over the water feature.

It looks really whimsical, and exactly like what we wanted.

This plant palette had a lot of leafy textures with the different varieties of sedges and different ferns, but we also wanted to attract pollinators.

So for that, we used Gregg's mistflower, dwarf Katie Ruellia.

We have different varieties of salvias, maybe three different varieties of salvias, or four.

Wisteria, a Texas variety.

My favorite ground cover is frogfruit, which it just spreads really profusely and it also blooms like crazy.

So, you'll get lots of bees for that one.

We wanted to give him something that will continue to thrive with very little maintenance.

Really, you can just ignore them and they're gonna look great because they're suited for our climate and native, they're used to our difficult summers and our (laughing) increasingly difficult winters.

- We did such a wonderful job with like the landscaping and the water feature out front, we really wanted to do something for the entrance.

We covered it over the top, and over time, there'll be plants growing down and then you'll have kinda plants flowing.

And then, we put a bunch of nautical bobbles in there at different kind of heights to kind of highlight it.

And so the idea over time is that the vines kinda grow in over the bobbles, that you'll be kind of walking almost into a garden as you kinda come into the house.

'Cause part of what I'm trying to do is, you know, get rid of those boundaries.

- From the beginning, Joey just expressed wanting a design starting from the inside of his house, transitioning out into the yard, blurring the borders and everything, everything just kind of crosses over into another space seamlessly.

In terms of the plant palette, it is a little bit different here in the backyard.

We do get some more dappled light.

Our approach to landscaping is just trying to invite nature back into the space, creating a sustainable landscaping and environment that not only you can enjoy, but also all of the other native animals that live in the area as well.

We were trying to kind of create these vignettes throughout the yard, focal points for different areas where you're seated.

So everything has some interesting feature that you can enjoy in that space.

- The Mother Nature sculpture over there, it's an amazing piece of sculpture.

That was created by Stuart Simpson, he's with Austin Carving, up north of town.

That started out as two tons of Austin limestone, Central Texas limestone brought just from here in three different segments.

He spent eight months of his life carving it.

- In this area, we have some soft leaf yucca, and that's one of my favorite evergreens to use as it will add structure to the garden.

And we also have crystals, like Brazilian quartz and Moroccan geodes.

- I went with Heidi out to Nature's Treasures, off of 35.

I went around there like a kid in candy store, just pickin' out crystals everywhere.

And one of the things I wanted was one big giant crystal, which is prominently featured in the lower water feature.

I really took guidance from Rain Lily on the actual placement for all the crystals.

When we bought the house, my wife recognized that one of the trees in our backyard was dead.

We had a company come out and take the tree down.

Well, what we were left with was a ball root that weighed about a ton.

And finally one day, Nelson Rockwood, my general contractor, turned to me and he's like, "What if we get one of those guys that takes a chainsaw and turns stuff into like a chair or a bench?"

And I was like, "Oh yeah, that's what we should do."

And he went off and found this guy named Wade, and then he put a gorgeous aqua resin on top of it, turned it basically into a loveseat for my wife and I.

So in the evenings, my wife and I will come out here and sit on that gorgeous cutout of a ball root nobody knew what to do with, and have a nice glass of wine and enjoy our creek.

So it was a wonderful collaboration.

For me, my favorite part is working with all these artists.

These people are amazing.

There are so many artists in this town, craftspeople, landscapers.

It's astonishing, and we should be celebrating those people.