Wrapping up his Major League Baseball playing career with the Astros in 2022 didn’t mean the end of All-Star catcher Jason Castro’s relationship to the city of Houston. Instead, Castro and his wife, Maris, were set on keeping the roots their family had established in Texas. The couple, who met as undergraduate athletes at Stanford, formed strong ties to the city where Castro began and concluded his 12 years in the MLB (which also included stints in Minnesota and Southern California). Once a home had been purchased, it was renovation time. But Maris recalls that Jason harbored doubts about the success of that effort. “He only agreed to the renovation plan if Studio McGee was on board,” she says. “We had been following Shea on Instagram for years…and loved everything [she] touched. We felt like we wanted to give our designer full reign on the house with little interference…. But to do so, we had to agree on a designer we both trusted—and Studio McGee was the only one!”
Once McGee signed on, her focus turned to further grounding the Castros and their three young kids in their adoptive city and navigating the couple’s contrasting tastes. “Jason loves a more modern aesthetic, and Maris prefers traditional,” the Utah-based founder of Studio McGee says. “So, that was the direction from the beginning—to blend those aesthetics together so that we could make everyone happy.” The project itself took a surprising turn early on too. What was initially planned as a remodel with the Houston-based architecture firm Reagan & André pivoted to a larger ground-up construction project. Nonetheless, the team’s early efforts informed the final outcome of the 9,000-square-foot house that faces the street with an unabashedly symmetrical stone and painted brick façade capped by a trio of gabled dormers.
“The exterior looks almost identical to what the remodel plan was originally, and we followed the same flow from room to room,” McGee notes. “One…