Matsen House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1953, distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Texas at Austin, Frederick Albert Matsen (1913-2006), and his wife, Cecelia Christina (Kirkegaard) Matsen (1910-2006), built this home. The couple worked with Austin architects Carlton Brush and Joseph Buffler, influenced by Frank Lloyd wright, who was active in Racine, Wisconsin, native town of the Matsens. The two-story house is built of limestone walls and cedar shakes on a wood frame. It exhibits mid-century modern and international elements, including horizontal emphasis in the flat roof and windows, use of natural light, and a floor plan incorporating the slope of the site.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1953 University of Texas chemistry and physics professor Frederick Albert Matsen and his wife Cecelia built this limestone-and-cedar home with Austin architects Carlton Brush and Joseph Buffler. Drawing on the couple's admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, active in their native Racine, Wisconsin, the two-story house embraces mid-century modern and International ideas—horizontal lines, natural light, and a plan that follows the slope of the land. It stands as a well-preserved expression of postwar modernist domestic design.
Why it matters
The house reflects how mid-century modernism and the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright reached into the homes of America's postwar university towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Matsen House belongs to the confident, forward-looking years after World War II, when American university towns were expanding fast and their faculty were building homes to match a modern outlook. Built in 1953, it rose in an Austin that was growing around a swelling University of Texas, its professors part of a national postwar surge in higher education and research.
Those years reshaped how Americans thought a house should look. The heavy ornament of earlier decades gave way to clean horizontal lines, walls of glass, and floor plans that opened to light and landscape. Mid-century modern and International ideas, once the province of a few avant-garde architects, were reaching ordinary neighborhoods and the homes of professionals.
This particular house also carried a thread of the American Midwest into Central Texas. Its owners hailed from Racine, Wisconsin, a region where Frank Lloyd Wright had left a deep architectural mark, and they brought that sensibility south with them when they chose to build in limestone and cedar on a sloping Austin lot.
People & events
The house was the creation of Frederick Albert Matsen, a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Texas at Austin, and his wife, Cecelia Christina Kirkegaard Matsen. In 1953 the couple set out to build a home that reflected their taste, working with the Austin architects Carlton Brush and Joseph Buffler.
Their design drew openly on their admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, who had been active in Racine, Wisconsin, the Matsens' hometown. That influence shows in the building's language: two stories of limestone walls and cedar shakes on a wood frame, a flat roof emphasizing the horizontal, generous windows pulling in natural light, and a plan that works with the slope of the site rather than flattening it.
The result is a house shaped by two scientists' sensibilities and a pair of local architects' skill, a deliberate piece of design rather than a builder's standard model. The Matsens lived out their long lives in it, both reaching well into their nineties, their home standing as a record of the ideas they cared about.
Its place in the American story
The Matsen House shows how modernism traveled from famous names into everyday American life. Frank Lloyd Wright's influence did not stay confined to celebrated public commissions; it filtered into private homes designed by regional architects for clients who admired his work, exactly as it did here.
The house also marks the arrival of a national design movement in the postwar university town. Across the country in the 1950s, professors, scientists, and professionals embraced mid-century modern and International styles as expressions of a rational, optimistic age, and their homes clustered around growing campuses. This Austin house is one local instance of a coast-to-coast phenomenon.
In its very materials, limestone and cedar rather than imported industrial finishes, it reflects a distinctly American impulse to root modern architecture in the local landscape. The building follows its sloping site instead of dominating it, an idea central to Wright's thinking and to a broader American ideal of homes that belong to their ground.
If you visit
This is a house to appreciate from the street and with respect, as a private residence rather than a public attraction. Approach it as you would a piece of design, taking in how the building sits with, rather than against, the slope it was built on.
Look for the mid-century vocabulary the marker describes: the strong horizontal lines of the flat roof and windows, the honest pairing of limestone and cedar, and the way the design invites daylight inside. These are the quiet signatures of the era, and seeing them in person makes the style's logic click into place.
If you enjoy architecture, this makes a rewarding stop on a tour of Austin's postwar and modernist buildings, a chance to see how national design ideas took root in a Texas university town. Keep your visit to the public view, and let the house speak through its lines and materials as its owners intended.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Frederick Albert Matsen
- · Cecelia Christina Kirkegaard Matsen
- · Frank Lloyd Wright
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McClendon-Price House
Austin, TX
Architect Charles H. Page designed this house in 1906 for Judge James Wooten McClendon and his wife Annie, on land her father gave as a wedding gift. McClendon served 26 years as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals, and fellow judges rented the home before the family sold it in 1944. In 1960 it passed to University of Texas head football coach and administrator Ed Price, whose family lived in the 2½-story American Foursquare, its buff-brick walls blending Prairie, Craftsman, and Eclectic styles.
St. David's Rectory
Austin, TX
Built in 1910 for Annie and James McClendon, this modified four-square house served St. David's Episcopal Church as its rectory from 1914 to 1975. The church later gave the home as a retirement gift to the Rev. Charles Sumners, a noted minister and community leader, and his wife Virginia, who lived here for decades. Its leaded-glass windows, stacked-rock chimney, and decorative brackets survive as an example of early-20th-century Austin residential design.
Neill-Cochran House
Austin, TX
Master builder Abner Cook raised this Greek Revival mansion of hand-cut limestone around 1853 in the young capital of Austin, using a mortar famously bound with pig bristles. In its early decades it served as Texas's first Institute for the Blind and, in 1865, as a hospital for Civil War soldiers, before becoming home to Republic of Texas figure Col. Andrew Neill and later Judge Thomas B. Cochran. Its walls trace Austin's growth from frontier town to state capital.
The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs Headquarters
Austin, TX
The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, founded in 1897 to advance education and humanitarian causes, achieved its dream of a permanent state headquarters with this building in the early 1930s. Designed by prominent Dallas architect Henry Coke Knight, it is among the finest examples of Georgian Revival architecture in Texas, crowned by a dominant two-story central portico. The building anchored decades of statewide women's civic organizing.