The Many Lives of Atelier 1205
At first glance, the small wood-frame house at 1205 East Cesar Chavez looks like a quiet holdout. Its gabled roof and front porch belong to an earlier Austin, while the landscaped courtyard, gallery walls, and creative offices inside speak to the city Austin has become.
That tension between old and new is what makes Atelier 1205 feel at home here.
The house was built around 1902 for Walter and Ida Bonugli, who lived at 1205 while Walter’s family operated a prominent grocery next door. His father was born in Italy; his mother in Texas, and Walter built a career in Austin’s bottling and food trades, work that tied this block to the everyday commerce of the corridor. The house was never separate from the life of the street. It sat among stores, delivery routes, workers, and families moving between home and business.
That street had an older name. In Austin’s original 1939 plan, the downtown line closest to the Colorado River was called Water Avenue. It became East First Street in 1887, and then César Chávez Street in 1993. The old grid is still legible nearby. North-south streets carry the names of Texas rivers, while the east west streets became the numbered streets we know today.
A 1941 photograph taken one block away, looking west from San Marcos Street, brings that earlier corridor into view. Grocery signs hang over shaded storefronts, houses sit close to the road, and the street feels both commercial and residential.
Around this time at 1205, the city directory lists Alfred L. and Dorothy Stanley as renters, and gives his occupation as “Plumber (at the house).” Others didn’t go much farther for work: a meat market next door, service station up East First, a department store counter downtown. In 1947, Ricardo and Seferina Guerrero bought the house and their family held it into the 1990s, longer than any owner before or since, renting it out for most of those years. Each resident left fragments in directories and records, but together they gave the building its layered history, generations of ordinary Austin lives unfolding under one roof.
By 2015, that story nearly ended. A demolition application proposed clearing the boarded-up house for surface parking to serve a commercial project on the adjacent Bonugli grocery site, a project that never broke ground. The City’s historic preservation staff recognized the house’s importance to East Austin history, but alterations over the decades disqualified it from a landmark recommendation. The Historic Landmark Commission released the demolition permit on its consent agenda, seven votes to nothing. The house was cleared to come down, but it didn’t.
In 2017, Forsite Studio and ADLA Studio partnered to buy the property, bringing architecture and landscape architecture together in its restoration. The building has a new life as Atelier 1205, where the design-build practices now have their offices and a shared creative space for exhibitions and events.
The familiar bungalow form and front porch remain, with high ceilings and while walls against the original shiplap. The space shifts between working studio, gallery, gathering place, and a venue during SXSW. Outside, layered planting softens the edge between the building and the street. Rooms once occupied by families and workers now hold designers, artists, clients, and guests.
Today, the street is in the process of being renamed again as community conversations imagine a proposed El Corazón Culture and Arts District. A district like that would be made of houses like this one. The corridor has long been shaped by Mexican American and immigrant families, small businesses, and neighbors who made it a place of work, exchange, and daily life. Atelier 1205 carries that history forward at the scale of one house, still inhabited and in use after more than a century.
Contact:
Atelier 1205:
https://www.atelier1205.com/
Instagram: @atelier1205
Foresite Studio:
https://www.forsitestudio.com/
Instagram: @forsitestudio
ADLA Studio:
https://adlastudio.com/
Instagram: @adlastudio
