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Tasked with designing the interiors of The Birdsall Residences, linked with the city's first Auberge Resorts Collection hotel, architect Dillon Kyle channels the touchpoints of River Oaks. S itting at a table in his former office conference room — the one that's been converted into a sales gallery for The Birdsall's private residences — architect Dillon Kyle is surrounded by things he loves. This includes Cedar Bayou brick. "When you see a super classic, old River Oaks house, it's probably Cedar Bayou brick," Kyle says. "It's that kind of a brownish salmon color. Very soft feeling. We use it a lot." Kyle gets up from the table to point out the Cedar Bayou bricks displayed on the shelves along the wall, noting the difference between it and old Texas brick, which is also on the shelves, shown off the way Hermès might display a $9,700 R.M.S. Weekender bag. Kyle encourages a visitor to feel the bricks for themselves, to get the tactile comparison. To say Dillon Kyle is extremely detail-oriented is akin to saying that Harrison Ford understands the power of dry wit. One needs only to spend a few minutes with Kyle to deduce this. It's part of the very essence of this architect, who's something of a River Oaks favorite. He started his firm, Dillon Kyle Architects, in his hometown of Houston in 1995 after practicing architecture in San Francisco and New York. But he's never done a project quite like The Birdsall Residences, the 44-unit private residential component of the first Auberge Resorts Collection hotel in Houston (The Birdsall), both within The RO, a new 17-acre mixed- use development from Transwestern coming to the intersection of West Alabama and Buffalo Speedway. "I feel like a lot of the condominium towers in Houston are kind of lonely and isolated," Kyle says. "They have walls around them and they're very fortress-like." Transwestern is pushing to make The RO very different from the imposing towers brigade, to bring more of a village-within-the-city feel, and hiring Dillon Kyle to design the interiors of the private residential component is an essential piece of that. "He knows what a River Oaks homeowner wants," Transwestern Development Company project executive Sean Suffel says. "He understands how they live." Roman and Williams, based in New York City, is designing The Birdsall hotel interiors. The directive Kyle received was to imagine he's building a house for someone that lives in River Oaks, only that house is now in a 34-story high-rise. Almost immediately, Kyle countered that in order to do that, he couldn't just inherit a floor plate from the building architect. He pushed for what someone designing the interior spaces almost never gets to do on a high-rise: the chance to truly collaborate with the building architect — Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), in First Look at The Birdsall Residences Rendering of the residential lounge at The Birdsall Residences, Auberge Resorts Collection, designed by Dillon Kyle. By Chris Baldwin 34