SOUTHERN EXPOSURE

Sneak a peek inside Southern Living's Fredericksburg 'Idea House'

The 4,000-square-foot Idea House in Frieden, a development in Fredericksburg, combines stone, brown siding, and a metal roof.

Photo courtesy of Laurey Glenn/Southern Living

The 2026 Southern Living Idea House opens for public tours on September 18 in Fredericksburg, bringing the magazine's long-running showcase-home series to the Hill Country.

The 4,000-square-foot house is in Friedën, a planned community about three miles from downtown Fredericksburg. The development is expected to include roughly 230 to 250 custom single-family homes when complete, along with commercial space, retail, offices, multifamily housing, trails, lakes, and green space.

The Idea House program is part model home, part design experiment, and part brand statement for Southern Living. For more than 35 years, the magazine has worked with builders, architects, designers, and landscapers to create homes in different parts of the South, usually pairing regional references with current home-design trends. Past projects have included homes in Nashville, Louisiana, Georgia, coastal Texas, and the Carolinas.

$Southern Living Idea House 2026\u200b$ This room really plays with textures, including an abstract art piece that looks a little like crushed velvet.Photo courtesy of Laurey Glenn/Southern Living

Texas last hosted a Southern Living Idea House in 2018, when the magazine renovated a 1980s fixer-upper in Austin's Northwest Hills. That project leaned on local architecture and design talent to turn an older house into a more open, family-oriented home.

This year's Fredericksburg project is a new-build contemporary farmhouse. The exterior mixes limestone, brown siding, and a dark metal roof, with separate wings arranged around a broad drive. The home also has floor-to-ceiling windows, multiple porches, and a backyard fire pit, which are meant to connect the interiors to the surrounding Hill Country setting.

The design team included a secondary private casita, a feature Southern Living says was intended as a nod to Fredericksburg's historic Sunday houses. Those small in-town homes, traditionally near churches, were once used by German settlers who had to travel long distances into Fredericksburg on weekends for church, shopping, and social visits.

$Southern Living Idea House 2026\u200b$ Dark wood cabinetry and brass hardware frame the kitchen’s veined stone backsplash and large island.Photo courtesy of Laurey Glenn/Southern Living

The interiors were split among three Texas designers: Jean Liu of Dallas, Marcus Mohon of Austin, and Paloma Contreras of Houston. The broader team includes builders Melanie Sparks and Chris McGinley of Kurk Homes, architect Andrew Bray of Mustard Architects in Fredericksburg, and landscape designer Melissa Gerstle of Dallas.

The kitchen uses dark wood cabinetry, brass hardware, pale pendant lights, and a heavily veined stone backsplash. It is more formal than a typical farmhouse kitchen, but the long island and six counter stools keep it oriented around gathering rather than display.

One bedroom takes a more traditional approach, with a four-poster bed, exposed wood beams, and green scenic wallcovering wrapped around the room. A matching green chair near the window and a pale patterned rug keep the palette tied together without making the room monochromatic.

$Southern Living Idea House 2026\u200b$ Green scenic wallcovering surrounds a four-poster bed beneath exposed wood beams.Photo courtesy of Laurey Glenn/Southern Living

Southern Living editor-in-chief Sid Evans said in the release that the house was designed to take cues from the Hill Country landscape while showing "a home that's as warm and welcoming as it is stylish and innovative."

Public tours run through December 20 at 518 Interlaken St. Tours are scheduled Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 am to 5 pm and Sundays from noon to 5 pm. Tickets are $44, with part of the proceeds benefiting Operation Finally Home, the Hunt Preservation Society, and the Gillespie County Historical Society/Pioneer & Vereins Kirche Museums.

$Southern Living Idea House 2026\u200b$ Look out for this cover on newsstands to pick up a copy and learn more about the home.Photo courtesy of Laurey Glenn/Southern Living

Southern Living is also scheduling several event weekends during the tour run, including Volvo test-drive weekends and a Holiday Classics event from December 4-6.

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growing Poängs

IKEA to close San Marcos mini-store after 16 months

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IKEA is saying goodbye to San Marcos.

Less than two years after opening, IKEA is packing up its San Marcos store. In an online statement, the retail giant said it has decided not to renew its lease at Sar Mar Plaza (929 SH-80 N.). The last day of business will be November 1.

The Swedish retailer called the location a "small city store," designed around "local living solutions." The approximately 35,000-square-foot store, opened in July 2025, is about the 10th the size of IKEA's biggest boxes, which often offer 300,000 square feet of argument-starting home goods.

Although the outpost doesn’t have an encyclopedic assortment of Kallax bookcases, it stocks around 2,000 products for immediate purchase — along with a curated selection of Swedish Food Market goodies. There's no word whether the store will have a going-out-of-business sale.

The smaller IKEAs were part of a strategy to bring the brand’s offerings to more urban areas, where the company's warehouse-style outlets may not find available real estate. The chain also opened a smaller format store in Dallas' University Park neighborhood in March, although it was almost twice the size of the San Marcos location.

"The opening of IKEA San Marcos exemplifies our strategy of developing smaller, more accessible urban store formats in this journey towards a more connected and accessible IKEA experience for the many," said Javier Quiñones, CEO & Chief Sustainability Officer of IKEA U.S., in an earlier statement.

The brand did not give a reason for the closure, but hinted that the mini-IKEAs are no longer a priority.

“We continue to test, explore, and develop new ways for customers to meet IKEA, while investing in home delivery, pick-up services and our online experience,” it wrote in the announcement.

San Marcos shoppers can continue to make impulse buys by making a drive down (or up) Interstate 35. The two closest stores are outside Austin in Round Rock and north of San Antonio in Live Oak.

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