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The entryway features an open, L-shaped staircase leading to the second floor.

The house features an open concept kitchen and living room.

Much of the homes has colorful, midcentury modern furnishings.

Lori Urbano special-ordered this dining room table from Australia.

Throughout the living area, the off-white walls are set off with pieces of her mostly abstract, very colorful art. 

The L-shaped stairway in the main entryway utilizes multiple materials, including custom stained white oak treads, black metal handrails and glass balusters. 

The pool is surrounded by the house on three sides, so it gets plenty of shade from about 2 p.m. on.

The backyard pool area features an outdoor kitchen space with a grill, sink and fridge as well as an outdoor powder room.

The pool is the centerpiece of the backyard.

Much of the home's furnishings and fixtures, such as this hanging light, are midcentury modern in style.

Lori Urbano turned one of her upstairs rooms into a cozy home theater space featuring a large television, high-end audio and a fridge for cold drinks and snacks.

One of the guest bedrooms in the Inverness home architect Lori Urbano built for herself.

One of the four bedrooms has been converted into a home office. 

Throughout the ground floor living area, the off-white walls are set off with pieces of her art collection, mostly abstracts, mostly very colorful and mostly from San Antonio artists. The furniture tends to me midcentury modern in style. 

Like many people building a new home, Lori Urbano had a wish list of things she wanted in her new place: a spalike owner's bedroom, a media room with surround sound, at least two guest rooms on the ground floor and an exercise room.

But Urbano is also an home builder, owner of San Antonio-based Urbano Design and Build. So when she was designing her new home, she also wanted it to be a showcase where potential clients could see examples of designs, techniques and products she likes to bring to her jobs.

“I added a lot of different things to the house so clients can see them in a real-life setting,” she said. “Any of them could work in any house, depending on how you use it.”

A view of the living and dining spaces in Lori Urbano's home located in the gated luxury neighborhood Inverness in North Central San Antonio.

Urbano, 48, has been a builder for 20 years and has lived in several different homes, but this was the first house she built for herself.

“It’s funny because people would always ask me, ‘Well, what does your home look like?’ ” she said. “But I didn’t have time to build the kind of house I wanted for myself.”

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She purchased a lot in the Inverness neighborhood near Wurzbach Parkway and N.W. Military Highway back in 2015, but other jobs kept her from starting the project. 

“I thought, well, things are gonna be slow for a while, so maybe now’s the time to build,” she said. “Then two months later everybody started calling and we got real busy. But I was still able to build the home that I wanted.”

Lori Urbano's new home is not only a place to live, it also serves as a showplace where she can bring potential clients to show them the styles, materials and techniques she likes to bring to her jobs.

Construction started in June 2020, and she moved into the house in May 2021. She declined to reveal the home’s cost. The four-bedroom, 5 ½-bath house was built in the transitional style, a look she describes as “contemporary but not too modern,” with an interior leavened with midcentury modern furnishings.

“There are elements in here that are contemporary, like the Euro cabinets in the kitchen,” she said. “But then I ended up doing a quartzite countertop to soften things up.”

The house opens with a grand, two-story entryway that utilizes multiple materials to illustrate how they can blend harmoniously. These include limestone walls that extend in from the home’s exterior, 30-by-30-inch porcelain floor tiles that complement the limestone, an L-shaped stairway made with custom stained white oak treads, black metal handrails and glass balusters and a wooden, tongue-and-groove ceiling. 

The 18-foot-high main room ceilings are traversed with large wooden decorative beams to give the room more character. She chose real timber simply because she wanted to, even though such beams were more expensive.

To the left of the foyer is the main living area, entered through an exceptionally high and wide doorway that tricks the mind into perceiving the house as being larger than it actually is. It was a deliberate design decision, Urbano said.

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“When you have wide open spaces, the house obviously doesn’t feel as small,” she explained. “This house is only 3,800 square feet, but it feels a lot larger. I mean, you can have a 6,000-square-foot home, and if it’s not designed properly, it can it feel very, very small.”

The living area is furnished with midcentury reproduction seating in rust, blue and neutrals surrounding a splay-legged coffee table and oriented toward a gas fireplace faced with lime plaster rather than the more common stone or brick because she wanted "something timeless." The off-white material shows the trowel marks, giving it a subtle depth.

The focal point of the adjacent kitchen is the 11-foot center island topped with quartzite. Wanting the island to pop, Urbano used a neutral lime plaster for the kitchen backsplash. 

In the adjacent kitchen, the focal point is the 11-foot center island with a waterfall edge of quartzite swirled in charcoal gray, ashy blue, green and brown taupe. Urbano said she so wanted the island top to pop that she had the same plaster from the fireplace applied in place a of traditional backsplash. 

“It’s treated with a sealant, so it’ll keep that nice, clean look,” she said. The look is so attractive in fact, she’s already using it for a backsplash on another house she’s building for clients who saw it while visiting her house.

Throughout the living area, the neutral walls are set off with pieces of her art collection, mostly colorful abstracts and San Antonio artists, including Bettie Ward, Ben Mata, Lucy Peveto and Eric Breish. 

“I like to have the colors of the art to pop,” she said. “That’s why I keep the walls neutral.”

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The living area's 18-foot ceiling is traversed with large wooden decorative beams she said help give the room character.

“And that’s real timber, not wrapped beams,” she said. “They were more expensive and a real pain to lift into place, but I wanted it, so I did it.”

Urbano decided to build her home in the Inverness neighborhood near Wurzbach Parkway and NW Military Highway because of its convenient, central location.

Several other things she wanted were a metal dining table imported from Australia, the breakfast table from Turkey and living room furniture purchased while she was in Miami. 

The ground floor owner's suite has two striking design elements: a vaulted ceiling (“I like to do a vaulted ceiling whenever I can,” she said) and wood paneling with decorative molding behind the bed.

“I kept on hanging art on that wall, but nothing worked,” she said. “Then I was in Miami and I saw something like this but in a different color and a different pattern. So when I came home I played around with the idea and I fell in love with it.”

A view of Lori Urbano's primary bedroom shows the wood paneling she decided to install behind her bed when she had trouble finding an art piece to hang there.

She installed a heated floor in the bathroom — another feature she now includes in most of her new builds — as well as a soaking tub and a large, glass-enclosed walk-in shower. She used the lime plaster here, too, tinting it a light gray for a different, darker look, and to show the material’s color options.

Upstairs there are two bedrooms, one of which serves as a home theater, complete with cozy seating, and ice maker for drinks and a big bowl of movie theater candy. 

“We've watch everything from comedies to action to dramas,” she said. “During the pandemic, I think I watched everything on Netflix and Prime.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct Urbano's occupation.

rmarini@express-news.net | Twitter: @RichardMarini

Richard A. Marini is a features reporter for the San Antonio Express-News where he's previously been an editor and columnist. The Association of Food Journalists once awarded him Best Food Columnist. He has freelanced for American Archaeology, Cooking Light and many other publications. Reader's Digest once sent him to Alaska for a week. He came back.