Architect William “Bill” Curtis sees beauty in the overlooked and unexpected — sheets flapping in the breeze on a clothesline, a weathered metal bucket in front of a window, light raking across empty tables in a restaurant set for lunch. He paints these scenes and others in meticulously detailed watercolors, a hobby he picked up years ago, studying under acclaimed Houston artist Mark Stewart. Curtis has since won numerous awards from the Watercolor Art Society – Houston, including top honors for his stark depiction of a birch tree in snow.

His first solo show, Bill Curtis Watercolors, opens this week at C2 Art Advisors in Houston and features a range of his work that includes pastoral scenes of rural Texas and architecture from his travels.

“I remember the day Bill first showed me his work, and my immediate reaction was to offer our space for an exhibition,” says Mary Hammon Quinn, president of C2 Art Advisors. “Bill is known as a highly skilled architect, and this show demonstrates his talent as an artist in every sense of the word.

“Watercolor is a very challenging medium, but he makes it look effortless. This is especially apparent in his ability to capture the many shades of white and the movement of water. His work is alive, capturing moments from his life and travels, and it’s important to me that people have the opportunity to see it.”

As an architect, Bill Curtis has sketched every day of his professional career. He’s a partner in Curtis & Windham Architects, the lauded Houston firm known for classically inspired houses in River Oaks and beyond. Curtis’ artistic spark ignited one afternoon during a summer vacation to Wyoming years ago, when he hiked to a spot overlooking a beautiful valley. Using materials borrowed from his wife Jane, who’s also an amateur artist, he sketched the spectacular scene around him.

“The evolution of my interest in watercolor has led me to see compositional moments that might afford good paintings,” Curtis says.

Using the camera on his phone, Curtis records his travels and observations, often painting those scenes later. “It’s a way to remember where I’ve been and what I’ve experienced,”he notes. “Painting has allowed me to create more vivid memories of my experiences through observation of composition, color, atmosphere and detail in the world in a much broader fashion than as an architect looking at buildings alone.”

These days, Curtis often paints from his 1890 farmhouse in Austin County, a former stagecoach stop. Read the story below about Bill Curtis’ farm and plein-air watercolor studio, which first appeared in part in 2021 in the PaperCity and Round Top print magazines, and has been updated.

Bill Curtis Watercolcors solo exhibit at C2 Art Advisors will be open for viewing October 1 through 11 at 3306 Mercer Street, second floor.

Bill Curtis Finds Rustic Charm in Round Top

Bill and Jane Curtis’ mellow 1890 farmhouse in Austin County — once a stagecoach stop — has been the family’s cherished retreat for more than 25 years and is where Bill paints many of his pastoral watercolors.

Architect William “Bill” Curtis fell in love with the Central Texas countryside about the same time he fell in love with his wife, Jane, almost 32 years ago. They recently celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary, so the exact details might be a little hazy, but he remembers it fondly.

“We were on the cusp of getting engaged and driving around the Round Top area talking about maybe getting a place out here,” he says. The morning had been so romantic with talk of building a getaway house in the country that when they stopped for lunch at Royers Cafe, Jane was convinced he was going to pop the question. He didn’t — and, to Jane’s amusement, didn’t for almost two more months.

“It remained a joke between us,” Bill Curtis says, laughing.

Eventually they did marry and restart the hunt for property in Austin and Fayette Counties, near the bucolic towns of Round Top, Shelby, Winedale and Fayetteville — on which to build a small house. By then, a second child was on the way, and his architecture practice was booming. He and architect Russell Windham had launched their firm, Curtis & Windham Architects, in Houston in 1991, which has since won numerous John Staub awards from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, Texas Chapter.

“We were so busy, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to build a house of our own at that point,” Curtis says. Instead, he and Jane decided to find an existing house they could fix up. “We spent about six months looking at a lot of toads and going down a lot of rabbit holes,” he notes. “They either required too much work, or the fields weren’t pretty, or there were no trees, or water, or whatever.”

The perfect place didn’t seem to exist — until Bill Curtis got an urgent call one wintry January day from his realtor, insisting they meet her at a three-bedroom house located on a swath of land halfway between Round Top and Industry. The cold and foggy drive got even foggier as they reached the house, and it was impossible to tell what anything looked like, even from the front porch.

“We opened the door, and it was just lovely inside,” Curtis remembers. “Jane and I looked at each other — we hadn’t even really seen it yet — and we said, ‘This is probably the one we need to buy.’” And they did.

Built in 1890, the house had originally served as a stagecoach stop. “The story was that one of the little rooms in the front was called a Stranger’s Room, where a bed would be so it could be accessed from the front porch if someone came in on the stagecoach late at night,” Curtis says.

In front of the house, you can still see a circular depression in the ground, which is thought to have been made by horses and carts turning around after dropping off cargo and passengers. “We don’t know whether that’s actually true or not, but it it’s a nice tale to think about,” Curtis says.

The architecture was originally designed in the era’s dogtrot style, with an open central hallway running through the middle, and over the years, previous owners made careful additions to the house.

“Inside, the architectural language of the house is simple: It’s just boards on the wall and exposed joists on the ceiling,” Curtis says.

Retired Houston designer Mollie Pettigrew helped the Curtises with their Houston house after they were first married, and she has also advised them through the years on decorating the farmhouse, now furnished with vintage and new pieces, some purchased from the fields at Round Top. After building so many ranch houses for clients, Curtis already had a good idea of what furnishings are suitable for rustic environments, such as metal beds and traditional hardware and plumbing fixtures that keep it looking authentic.

“It’s marvelous — everything we have feels like it belongs in an old farmhouse,” Curtis says.

He redesigned the kitchen with colleague Daniel Ostendorf, including reconfiguring the east-facing windows and painting the walls muted yellow. “It feels good to come in here in the morning,” he says. The family’s country retreat is comfortable but has remained rustic all this time, with no insulation and no Internet. They didn’t have a TV until a few years ago, when Curtis deemed it a safety necessity to monitor severe weather.

It’s a mellow way of life that falls in step with the old house and leaves the big-city hustle far behind. “I walk through the door and feel the pressure drop,” he says.

When the kids were younger, the family spent weekends at the farm “doing all the things you can’t do in town,” like fishing in the lake, hiking the creek, shooting skeet, and swimming in the stock tank. At night, under a magnificent canopy of stars, they built campfires and watched movies on the side of the barn; at times, coyotes yipped and howled in the distance.

The kids are now grown or away at school — they have two daughters and a son ranging from 22 to 28 years old — so it’s often just Curtis and his wife at the farm. While nearby Round Top has exploded in the last few years with visitors, shops and new restaurants, the farm is remote enough that their rural experience hasn’t really changed. The sunrises and sunsets are still worthy of long gazes, the darkened sky still reveals the Milky Way’s broad ribbon of stars, and the coyotes can still be heard from miles away.

Days at the farm are contemplative and often spent in the kitchen, cooking, reading, or working on jigsaw puzzles. Eight years ago, Curtis took up watercolor painting. As an architect, he’s sketched every day of his professional career, but the artistic spark ignited during a summer vacation to Wyoming. One afternoon, he borrowed Jane’s sketch materials and hiked to a spot overlooking a beautiful valley, drawing what he saw.

“It was so cathartic, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I wish I did more of it,’” he says. Back in Houston, he decided to take things to another level and learn to turn his sketches into watercolors. Since then, he’s been studying regularly with noted Houston artist Mark Stewart, who encouraged him to enter his paintings in a recent competition held by the Watercolor Art Society – Houston. Curtis’ stark painting of a birch tree in the snow took a top prize.

Bill Curtis often works from photographs, snapping anything that moves him — light raking across empty tables at Balthazar in New York City, sheets flapping in the breeze on a clothesline, a weathered metal bucket in front of a window — later sketching the scenes on watercolor paper before bringing out his brushes and paints. The quietude of the farm helps him focus.

“If the weather’s good, I’ll go out on our front porch and pull up a little wooden stool next to an old metal-top table, get some bottles of water, and just paint in the open air,” he says.

Not too long ago, he snapped a picture of the sun coming up on the farm, fog rising from the lake and settling over the trees. Later, he painted it.

“There’s something comforting about picking up a brush and trying to capture the pasture in its own environment,” Curtis says. “Painting has been a nice complement to life in the country.”