We design custom homes, careful renovations and residential streetscapes across Texas — spaces shaped by light, material and the everyday life of the people inside them.
Rainer Thum Architects is an eight-person studio working out of a converted warehouse in southwest Houston. We take on a small number of projects each year — usually four or five — so that every drawing that leaves our desks has been thought about carefully, more than once.
Our founder, Claude Johnson, grew up between Texas and central Germany and trained under Rainer Thum in Frankfurt before returning home to open the practice in 2011. That mix of Texan pragmatism and European restraint still runs through everything we build.
Meet the studio
Ground-up single-family homes designed around your site, your budget and the way your household actually moves through the day.
Explore →Careful, permit-ready renovations that open up old floor plans without erasing what made the house worth keeping in the first place.
Explore →Master-planned residential streets, courtyards and shared outdoor spaces designed for neighborhoods rather than for the car.
Explore →Before you commit, we walk the site, review zoning and produce a short document telling you honestly what your lot can support.
Explore →Cabinetry, joinery, lighting layouts and material palettes coordinated with the architecture — never bolted on afterwards.
Explore →Native Texas planting, shade strategy, water and site drainage designed together with the building, not after it.
Explore →Every project runs through the same simple sequence. Nothing is skipped, nothing is invisible, and you know what happens next at every stage.
Two to three long conversations on the site itself. We ask more questions than we answer.
Hand drawings, three schemes, a fixed budget band. You choose one before we ever open a computer.
Full construction documents, permit set, engineering coordination and material specifications.
Weekly site visits with your contractor until the last punch-list item is closed.
The studio treated our lot the way a jeweler treats a stone. Every window is where it is for a reason we can now feel.
Claude was in our house more often than our contractor. We stayed on budget and moved in three weeks ahead of schedule.
They designed the whole cul-de-sac, not just our house. Our neighbors have thanked us more than once.
We answer every enquiry personally, usually within one business day.
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