Location: Austin, Texas

Completed: 2018

Design Team: Gary Furman, Philip Keil, Catherine French, Jamie Kerensky, Drew Wilson

Contractor: IE2

Structural Engineer: Architectural Engineers Collaborative

MEP Engineer: AYS Engineering

Landscape Design: dwg.

Interior Design: Verokolt

Lighting Design: Studio Lumina

Photographer:  Leonid Furmansky

This is the latest and largest outpost of Austin’s beloved Easy Tiger Bake Shop and Beer Garden, anchoring a revitalized 1980’s-era strip mall on the north side of town. The back-of-house space contains a large commercial artisanal bakery, which supplies bread and pastries to many of Austin’s finest restaurants. The public-facing spaces include an indoor bar, bakeshop, and dining room, a 250-seat outdoor beer garden pavilion, and a drive-thru coffee bar.

The design is an exercise in place-making, using the new elements to breathe life into what was a fairly banal stucco commercial strip and parking lot. The character of the space derives from sharing views between the layers of a somewhat unusual collection of activities; patrons have a view of the bakers unloading freshly-baked bread from the deck ovens, and the typically unseen craftwork of pastry chefs and charcuterie butchers is on display, providing a lively backdrop to the bar scene.

The new outdoor beer garden was carved out of an existing, oddly-shaped parking lot, and borrows the site’s surrounding live oak trees to complement a new, airy pavilion structure to create a lush landscape setting for the outdoor activities.

Recognition:

AIA Austin Design Award: Adaptive Reuse, 2022

Eater Austin, “Inside Easy Tiger’s Sprawling New Beer Garden and Bakery”, 2018

Austin Chronicle, “New Photos of Easy Tiger at The Linc”, 2018

Eater Austin, “Easy Tiger’s Highly Anticipated North Location”, 2018