Home Is Where the History Is at This Epic Texas Ranch – Garden & Gun

That first visit Lauren and Wilson Hawa had no inkling of all the stories held within the limestone walls of Gallagher Ranch. It was 2019, and the couple were scouting for a weekend gathering spot just outside San Antonio, where they live with their three young children. “Our entire marriage, our dream was to have a big place where all of our friends and family could come,” Lauren says. “Brothers, cousins, grandparents, everyone on both sides.” Perhaps this property, with just a little bit of work, could be the one.

Redbuds and mountain laurels bloomed, shaded by live oaks spread across more than fifteen hundred rolling Hill Country acres. San Geronimo Creek bubbled past juniper patches, and at the heart of it all stood the horseshoe-shaped hacienda made of cut stone, cedar and cypress beams, and terra-cotta roof tiles. Of course, with nineteen bedrooms, seventeen and a half bathrooms, twenty-two fireplaces, a massive central courtyard, and seemingly endless expanses of covered porches and ferny, vine-draped archways and nooks, it might be more aptly described as the Lone Star version of a palace.

The Hawas were smitten—“blown away,” as Wilson puts it—if not a little overwhelmed by the scale. But the ranch had cast its spell. “Once we were under contract, I reached out to Melissa Morgan,” Lauren says of the designer behind the San Antonio firm M Interiors. “I started to tell her, and when I said the word Gallagher, she audibly gasped.”

Morgan knew that this place carried the history of the entire state of Texas. How some consider it the Lone Star State’s oldest dude ranch, but that its memory stretches even further back to 1833, when the Mexican president commissioned an Irish immigrant and civil engineer, Peter Gallagher, to turn scrubland outside of San Antonio into a military depot and fortress. How the cunning Gallagher retained his property titles when he began working for the Texas government following the state’s revolution. How at one point, the spread housed fifty people and boasted a school, hotel, general store, and two churches. How more than a century later, in 1999, when he directed the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, Billy Bob Thornton chose the ranch as the setting where Matt Damon’s character falls in love with Penélope Cruz’s.

But in the reality of the early days of the pandemic, before giving in to the ranch’s romantic history, the Hawas had to first check off what they dubbed the “unsexy” stuff: repairing crumbling rock walls, overhauling the septic system, squaring ancient drafty windows, strategically hiding central AC units to temper the deadly summer heat.

The couple, along with Morgan, decided not to meddle with much of anything else. “The bones are just too good,” Morgan says. “This is not a project where you rip out the bathrooms and redo the kitchen. It doesn’t even look like we renovated, because you could never replicate this house or its materials. You could never get that same longleaf pine, that terra-cotta, that local rock, those cypress beams.”

Instead, Morgan focused on hunting down antiques that felt as if they’d always been at home there. A giant carved Spanish table anchors the main living room, topped with three green ceramic pineapple jars handmade in Oaxaca. Wilson collects vintage oil paintings, and Morgan hung them alongside Portuguese pottery, taxidermy pieces, and a stately pair of wrought-iron chandeliers. Painted chests, corner cabinets, and primitive pine furniture that Morgan won at auction in Denmark nod to the region’s many European influences. “And because this is a young family, nothing could be too precious,” Morgan says. “Antiques are often kind of dinged up already, because they’ve lived life, so it lets you breathe a sigh of relief when there’s a new scratch.”

In one room, craggy cutouts in the stone that once served as gun slits during skirmishes and raids are now encased in glass and filter the morning sunlight. An upstairs corridor, awash in rustic shades of green on the ceilings, walls, and pine floorboards, functions as a bunk room that can—and does—sleep a dozen or so kids. On many weekends, the Hawa children spend afternoons fishing along the San Geronimo with their friends and cousins, connected to their parents by walkie-talkies.

In one of the outbuildings, Morgan discovered 1970s-era punched-copper light fixtures and, after dusting them off, realized they were the work of the late Isaac Maxwell, a well-known San Antonio artist and architect. “We rewired them,” Morgan says, “and they hang proudly in the kitchen now,” complements to the copper-topped bar that sits across the living room in a cozy cocktail alcove, the perfect spot for mixing up margaritas as guests arrive.

“My two favorite times to be out at the ranch are when we have a huge group of people here, like for every Thanksgiving since we bought it,” Lauren says. “But I also love when there’s no one here but us. The courtyard has these lights on the oak tree that hang down and sway with the wind. Sometimes, when it’s quiet and everyone else is already asleep, I look out there and I can’t believe that we get to be the stewards of this place.”