Issue No. 1 · July 2026
welcome
Hi, We're Alan & Thomas
Hi, we're Alan and Thomas — co-owners of Strong Landscaping and Ella & Joy, and, more importantly for this newsletter, life partners who share a home, a family, and a genuine love of good design, inside and out.
You might already know us from The Landscaping Ledger, our newsletter about your landscape. This one is different. Several times a year, we'll send along something more personal — a look at how we actually live, what we're working on, what we're loving, and the small, ordinary moments that make up our life together.
The truth is, we don't think of our clients as just clients. We think of you as family — and family gets let in a little further than the front gate. This is us opening the door.
We're glad you're here.
From our home to yours
Getting Outside When It's This Hot
Our son Spencer just wrapped up his swim season, and these days he's spending his newly free afternoons the same way most kids around here are — chasing any excuse to be near water. When it's 98 degrees by lunchtime, that's not really optional. It's survival.
But even water breaks eventually turn into "I'm bored," and this is where we've landed on our favorite answer: get in the kitchen for twenty minutes and make something together. Our go-to this summer has been browned butter rice krispy treats — the same treat everyone already loves, but with the butter browned first, which sounds like a small thing and turns out to be everything.
Browned Butter Rice Krispy Treats
currently loving
Supergoop! Sunscreen
We've become the kind of household that has a Supergoop! product in nearly every bag, car, and bathroom drawer — and once you start, it's hard to stop. Our favorite is the Unseen Sunscreen Stick — it goes on like a chapstick, no white cast, no greasy film, and it's genuinely the sunscreen we remember to actually use.
Thomas keeps one in the Jeep for job-to-job touch-ups — though we've learned the hard way not to leave it baking on the dash in July. A little heat and it gets soft fast, so it lives in his bag now instead, safely out of the sun it's supposed to be protecting us from.
Beyond the stick, we've worked our way through most of the lineup and haven't found one we didn't like. If you want to see what the fuss is about without committing to a full shelf of products, the Daily SPF Starter Kit is a good, low-risk way in.
FULL DISCLOSURE
And no — don't just take our word for it. We're not sponsored, we're not being paid, and Supergoop has no idea we exist. We just really like not getting sunburned.
Behind the design
A Hill Country Getaway, Twenty-Three Floors Up
Not every project starts with a blank canvas. This one started with a family who already knew exactly who they were — both parents are UT grads, their twins are headed to campus this fall, and they wanted a place downtown where the whole family could actually gather.
The space itself is a modern high-rise unit — floor-to-ceiling windows, skyline views stretching out in every direction, the kind of clean architectural lines you'd expect from downtown Austin. Beautiful, but also a little cold on its own. That tension became the whole point of the project. We've started calling this approach Hill Country Modern: taking a sleek, contemporary shell and layering in the things that make a space feel like Texas. Local Texas artists on the walls instead of anything mass-produced. Earth tones — the colors of limestone and live oak and Hill Country sunsets. Natural materials wherever we could bring them in.
Right now, this one is still very much a work in progress — mood boards, material samples, sketches taped to the wall of our office. We can't wait to show you the finished home this fall, right around the time as the family is enjoying football season.
A preview of the vision boards -- more to come as the project develops
If a space of yours could use a little of that same warmth, we'd love to talk.
A small ritual
The News, Together
Most nights, we're not actually watching the news at 5:30 like it airs. We record it — NBC Nightly News, same channel, same habit for longer than either of us can quite remember — and we wait. Whoever gets home first doesn't just turn it on. We hold it until we're both on the couch, remote in hand, ready to press play together.
It's a small thing, maybe even a little old-fashioned. But there's something about that half hour that's become one of the few moments in the day that's just ours — no phones, no projects, no talking about the business.
Some nights it's the only real conversation we have all day. Other nights we don't talk much at all, and that's fine too. The waiting is the point as much as the watching.
What's inspiring us
Disneyland's Gardens
We just got back from Disneyland, and if you'd told us the thing we'd be talking about most wasn't a ride but the landscaping, we might not have believed you a few years ago. We walked somewhere close to 25 miles over a few days, and in between the rides — Space Mountain, ridden five times by Alan and Spencer — Thomas and his mom, Gigi, kept stopping to notice the flowers.
Spencer, for the record, was not as enthusiastic about this particular hobby. There's only so many times a twelve-year-old can be asked to admire a flower bed before "can we PLEASE go on a ride now" becomes the general mood of the group.
Disneyland's horticulture team plants somewhere around 800 species and tens of thousands of seasonal flowers a year, all timed and placed to tell a story. Much of that work happens overnight, so guests wake up to a garden that looks like it's always been exactly that way.
That idea — that a landscape can be so considered it feels inevitable — is something we think about constantly in our own work, just at a much smaller scale. We came home tired, sunburned (thank goodness for the Glowscreen stick), and a little more inspired than we expected to be.
A few of Gigi's favorites
Until next time
Thanks for Reading
That's our first issue of At Home with Alan & Thomas — thank you for reading it, and for letting us into your inbox in the same breath as your morning coffee.
If something here made you smile, or you tried the rice krispy treats, or you just want to say hello — send us a message [email protected]. We read everything.
Until next time.
At Home with Alan & Thomas
A personal newsletter from the owners of Strong Landscaping and Ella & Joy.
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