Austin sculptor Charles Umlauf died in 1994 at age 83. Yet, in some ways, he never really left us.

NOTE: This story was originally posted June, 21, 2011. We circulate it now because we will soon compare Umlauf’s project with his friend and colleague Seymour Fogel’s similar and nearly contemporaneous renovation in South Austin.

Thousands of Austinites have visited his namesake Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum on Robert E. Lee Road. They have attended fairy-tale weddings there, examined the institution’s 263 pieces of art, or wandered the undulating hollow off Robert E. Lee Road during the annual Umlauf Garden Party.

Other examples of Umlauf‘s fluid sculptures are scattered around town, especially on the University of Texas campus, where he taught for several decades.

Sixty or so of his sculptures remain in the Umlauf family’s hands. A few dozen of those, including studies of his late student Farrah Fawcett, are for sale right now at the Russell Fine Art Collection on West Sixth Street.

Others, rarely seen and too cumbersome to transport easily, grace the old Umlauf home, positioned high above the museum.

Someday, you, too, will stand atop this crooked hill. You’ll peer southeast into the shady Barton Heights neighborhood, northeast down to Lady Bird Lake, northwest to lower Barton Creek, southwest to the museum.

You’ll enter, briefly and curiously, into the life of the late sculptor and his widow, Angeline Umlauf, now 96. She has lived on this five-sided property for almost 70 years, helping to raise six children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. (Angeline Umlauf died the year following the original publication of this story.”

I visited the promontory for the first time last week, thanks to art dealer Lisa Russell and Louis Umlauf, 66, the middle child who shares the half-modern house with “Angie, ” his mother. Few Austinites have explored this hidden part of the land given to the City of Austin by the Umlaufs in April 1985. A granite staircase – no longer safe – that once connected the upper and lower properties is disguised by overgrowth (giving the passage a sort of “Secret Garden” feel).

After Angeline Umlauf‘s death, the City of Austin museum will take possession of the hilltop house, studio and gardens. The buildings will be renovated and the gardens refreshed, cleaving to the Umlaufs‘ landscaping since they purchased the once-abandoned stone house in 1944.

The land has undergone enormous changes since Louis and the other Umlauf kids camped out on the cliffs above what is now busy Barton Springs Boulevard. Only the occasional car crossed the clacking wooden bridge over Barton Creek back then. Horses, rented in Zilker Park, nosed around the hilltop. Casting ponds for anglers waited down where the museum and sculpture garden stand.

“We called it ‘The Weeds, ‘” Louis Umlauf says. “We played every kind of war game down there.”

Approaching the house from a tall, metal security gate, one passes dozens of Umlauf‘s muscular works before turning around an oval drive. The family’s ranch-style house, with its pale mahogany paneling and suppport beams, looks right out of the 1940s and ’50s, when a pre-existing structure was turned into a temporary studio, then a cozy home.

Yet look closely at the original stone walls and fireplace inside. Family lore dates this part of the building to the 1920s, when two women lived here and left it, for a while, a “haunted house.” Yet the limestone construction methods point to an earlier period, the middle of the 19th century, when these former Tonkawa camping grounds above Barton Springs supported dairy farms and other rural concerns.

“Bubi Jessen with Jessen Architects did the remodel, in exchange for Umlauf‘s cast stone ‘Poetess’ sculpture, which the Jessen family later gave to Laguna Gloria, ” says Nelie Plourde, director of the museum and sculpture garden.

A wooden, stand-alone studio was added nearby during the 1950s. Russell knows the sculptures and drawings here intimately. Yet she makes a discovery in the crowded, well-lighted studio, uncovering a small piece that has weathered naturally. She points out the room reserved for works broken in transit or during the casting process.

On the grounds, Russell tells the backstory behind the monumental “Maria Regina” that was deemed too sexy by Umlauf‘s ecclesiastical clients in Louisiana. (Asking price: $75,000.)

Aptly, Charles Umlauf‘s ashes are spread beneath tall cedars at the southwest end of the hilltop. A simple memorial marker is attended by sculptures, some of them religious in nature, including a portrait of Pope John XXIII, whom Umlauf admired. Some day – one hopes not too soon – Angie Umlauf‘s ashes will join her husband’s at this contemplative spot. After all, the house and grounds helped define her life’s work.

“She’s always described the house as her nest, ” granddaughter Carla Umlauf-Cheesar told an American-Statesman reporter in 2007. “She made it feel lived-in and warm.”