Location: Austin, Texas
Completed: 2018
Design Team: Gary Furman, Philip Keil, Catherine French, Jamie Kerensky, Drew Wilson
Contractor: IE2
Landscape Design: .dwg
Interior Design: Verokolt
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
Austin Chronicle, New Photos of Easy Tiger at The Linc  Austin Eater, Easy Tiger’s Highly Anticipated North Location