When clients walked into the Barton Creek Vintage View after move-in, the steel perimeter fence was the first thing they pointed at. Not the wine cellar, not the kitchen. The fence. That is unusual on a 1972 hill-country remodel and worth a story.
Why a steel fence
The 1972 home sat on a Barton Creek lot with downtown Austin views and a sloped front yard. The original wood split-rail fence was rotted at every post, leaning into the driveway, and visually fighting the new modern-meets-vintage interior we were rebuilding inside.
We considered three alternatives:
- Replace in kind (cedar split rail). Cheapest, but visually wrong for the new direction.
- Cable rail with stained walnut posts. Cleaner, but read too residential-deck for a perimeter run.
- Custom-fabricated steel with a clear powder-coat over hot-dipped galvanized. Most expensive, most appropriate.
Mac Shugart (Bijou Commercial) and his fabrication partner had recently finished a custom steel rail run on a downtown condo. The same shop could handle a residential perimeter and offer a graphite-tinted topcoat to match the new exterior steel window frames inside the house. That sealed it.
Design constraints
The fence had to do three things at once:
- 01Mark the property line without visually shrinking the lot.
- 02Read modern from the street and vintage from inside the courtyard.
- 03Survive the Texas freeze-thaw and a south-facing summer of UV.
We landed on a 42-inch tall vertical pickets, 5-inch on center, with a thicker top rail and a recessed bottom shadow line. From the street, the fence reads tight and contemporary. From inside the courtyard looking out, the gaps frame the oaks and downtown skyline like a series of vertical postcards.
Fabrication details
- Picket stock: 3/4-inch square solid bar, not hollow tube. Adds weight, kills resonance, no rust path through hollow interior.
- Top rail: 2-inch x 1.5-inch HSS, sized to read substantial without being heavy. All welds ground flush on the outboard face.
- Posts: 3-inch square HSS set in 36-inch deep, 12-inch diameter concrete piers below frost. Spacing varied lot-by-lot to align with mature trees instead of fighting them.
- Finish: hot-dipped galvanized, then graphite tinted powder coat over a zinc-rich primer. Three coats total. Twenty-year manufacturer warranty on the topcoat.
What we would do differently next time
Two refinements for future runs:
- 01Pre-drill the picket-to-rail penetrations at the shop and dry-fit before powder coat. Field welds required two small touch-up paint cycles. Shop welds with cleaner geometry would have eliminated the touchup.
- 02Spec the gate hinges with grease-fitting zerks. Our hinges have to be removed and lubricated every two years. Greaseable hinges would have moved that to every five.
Cost, honestly
Custom steel of this caliber runs $200 to $325 per linear foot installed in Austin, depending on lot, design complexity, and finish. Cedar split rail is $35 to $55. Aluminum tube fence is $85 to $140. You pay for steel because of the look, the weight, and the 50-year horizon. It is not a cost-down play.
Why we publish this
Most builder blogs publish polished hero shots and a project name. This is a fence on one project. But the question we get most often from new clients is not what to build. It is how decisions get made when there are tradeoffs. Documenting the why behind the steel fence is closer to the truth of what working with Bijou is actually like.
Related project
See more of the Barton Creek Vintage View project
Barton Creek, Westlake, Austin, TX