Living room

AT HOME WITH

Noah Hawley

The screenwriter and his wife, Kyle, settled in Austin, Texas, “a grounding, beautiful place.”

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Kyle Hawley and Noah Hawley sitting on a green couch in a living room with a wood-paneled wall with built-in shelving behind them. A dog lies on an ottoman nearby.

By Addie Morfoot Photographs by Leonid Furmansky

Aug. 6, 2025

Noah and Kyle Hawley’s house in Austin, Texas, has five bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms and no closets.

Kyle Hawley and Noah Hawley sitting on a green couch in a living room with a wood-paneled wall with built-in shelving behind them. A dog lies on an ottoman nearby.

Kyle Hawley insisted that she didn’t want closets when she and her husband collaborated with the architect Murray Legge to build the house, a 4,500-square-foot home completed in 2017.

Kyle Hawley and Noah Hawley sitting on a green couch in a living room with a wood-paneled wall with built-in shelving behind them. A dog lies on an ottoman nearby.

The unusual setup forces the couple and their two children, 12 and 17, to be selective since they store their clothing in hallways.

Kyle Hawley and Noah Hawley sitting on a green couch in a living room with a wood-paneled wall with built-in shelving behind them. A dog lies on an ottoman nearby.

“It encourages editing during the year,” said Mr. Hawley, 58, who is the Emmy Award-winning showrunner and creator of the hit FX series “Fargo” and the creator of the highly anticipated “Alien: Earth” series. “If I think we have acquired too much because there’s no place to put things, then we have to make some choices.”

The Hawleys’ living room, with a black rotating bookcase in the foreground.

Mr. Hawley’s career is the culmination of a steady series of decisions from one profession to the next until he became a screenwriter.

Growing up in the West Village in Manhattan, he sang and played guitar and he initially aspired to be a musician.

After college, Mr. Hawley was in an alternative rock band called Base Nation and worked as a paralegal in New York and San Francisco. “I couldn’t ever be a rock star because I go to bed at 9 o’clock,” he said.

Mr. Hawley performs lead vocals on songs featured on the “Fargo” and “Alien: Earth” soundtracks. “I wasn’t able to make it in the music business, but in the end, I found a workaround.”

Two orange chairs with a white stove between.

When he lived in San Francisco, he wrote his first novel, “A Conspiracy of Tall Men” (1998), which was optioned by Paramount and the actor Patrick Stewart.

Two orange chairs with a white stove between.

Hollywood was calling so he and Ms. Hawley, who is an artist and designer, moved to Los Angeles, where he began a screenwriting career. He worked as a staff writer on the Fox television series “Bones” and sold multiple television pilots, but just when his career was getting hot, Mr. Hawley and his wife decided to move to Austin.

That was 2008. Mr. Hawley said Los Angeles gave him a career, and he likes to visit. “But, L.A. is a weird place.”

“Austin,” he said, “is a very grounding, beautiful place, and this period of time with my kids is finite.”

A rectangular black rotating bookcase in the Hawleys’ home.

A revolving bookshelf in the living room is stacked with six novels Mr. Hawley has written in the last 27 years, including a copy of his most recent tome, “Anthem,” a near-future exploration of contemporary America published in 2022.

“When I wrote the book, I was really wrestling with this question of how do you prepare your kids to thrive in a world in which people can’t agree with what reality is,” Mr. Hawley said of “Anthem.” “It’s not something I had to face when I was growing up. We all had a fundamental agreement of what was real and what wasn’t real, and the people who didn’t believe in our reality lived in a different ecosystem.”

The bookcase also holds a copy of “A Child’s Guide to Freud,” an illustrated children’s book, written by Louise Armstrong, Mr. Hawley’s mother. Published in 1963, the book explains the Oedipus complex. It was the first of many books that Ms. Armstrong would write.

“I realized later in life that so much of what I do I can trace back to my mother because her books were basically like, I don’t understand something, so let me go out and try and figure it out as part of this book process,” Mr. Hawley said. “That’s very similar to what I do.” (Ms. Armstrong died in 2008.)

In the foreground, a green dining table surrounded by green chairs. The living area is in the background.

The family gathers around a faux bois marble-finished wooden dining table in the kitchen to eat breakfast each morning, a couple hours after Mr. Hawley and Ms. Hawley wake at 5:30 a.m. and discuss their schedules and “talk-through” the day ahead, Mr. Hawley said.

In the foreground, a green dining table surrounded by green chairs. The living area is in the background.

“I did have a marble table here, but we needed a different proportion, and we wanted to change the color of it,” Ms. Hawley said.

The new dining room table came last summer after Ms. Hawley and their childrentraveled to Thailand in 2023 to visit Mr. Hawley during the filming of “Alien: Earth.” The eight-episode series, which will be released on Aug. 12, was inspired by the feature film franchise that debuted in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror movie “Alien.”

“After that trip, we expanded the kitchen a bit, put up some dividers, and added a little bit more color,” said Ms. Hawley, 53.

The bottom portion of the partial wall dividing the living room from the kitchen is made of millwork. The upper portion of the wall is a decorative pierced screen made of a steel skeleton structure, wood and medium-density fiberboard.

In the foreground, a wooden table with wicker chairs and a small stool around it. In the background, a wall of white kitchen cabinets and a large stove with a double oven.

The farmhouse kitchen has a 1970s aesthetic, with retro white appliances like a Smeg two-door refrigerator.

“Most of the family doesn’t love that refrigerator,” Ms. Hawley said. “They think it’s too small. But the challenge of our modern lives is that we have access to a lot more than we need. So, I was really trying to build in things that would help us and just exercise constraint around groceries.”

Any hesitations Mr. Hawley initially voiced about the fridge were quickly dismissed.

“They tried to put in a full modern-sized, 3,000-gallon refrigerator or whatever, and it was just too much,” he said. “It’s the kind of huge thing that you overfill and then you are like, ‘Oh, wait, we had this food in here all along?’”

An enameled, cast-iron farm sink with a built-in drainboard and backsplash was also picked by Ms. Hawley, with the help of the interior design firm Amity Worrel & Co.

From front to back, the living, dining and kitchen areas are shown from an elevated point of view.

Inspired by their children’s Montessori school education, a globe and a large chalkboard listing the week’s activities for each family member are within view of the green dining room table.

The chalkboard led to the creation of a “How To” letterpress series. At her studio and store, Letterpress PLAY in downtown Austin, Ms. Hawley printed “How To: Kitchen,” “How To: Career” and “How To: Adult” broadsides.

“It’s in jest, but also just true,” Ms. Hawley said. “We are trying to demystify these big things in life to our kids because no one sits down and explains it.”

A wooden table with a puzzle on it in a living area divided by a decorative wall.

Before she opened Letterpress PLAY, Ms. Hawley worked in a loft above the living room of the single-story dwelling. The loft was eventually transformed into a den with alarge custom sectional and a television.

The exterior of the home, which has white siding and a gray roof and a neon sign on one side.

Four bungalows, nicknamed the Calcasieu Cottages, came with the half-acre property. Built in 1936 by the Austin-based Calcasieu Lumber Company, the cottages once housed local workers. Two of the renovated and restored cottages connect to the main house. One is the couple’s bedroom, and the other one is being remodeled.

Ms. Hawley picked out this neon sign. “The sign is both an homage to my favorite Willie Nelson album and a reminder that hard work and a little stardust make dreams come true,” she said.

“Originally, we didn’t have fencing on the property,” Mr. Hawley said. “But what we realized was that we had built a proscenium. So, we would be in the yard or in the house, and people would just stop and they would watch and photograph the theater of our lives.”

An office with a wooden desk with a computer on it, the logo for Mr. Hawley’s production company, 26 Keys, on the wall, and a typewriter in a glass display.

In December 2024, Mr. Hawley moved his production company, 26 Keys, to a nearly 5,900-square-foot office near Austin’s Capitol building. The space includes offices, conference rooms, a library, editing suites and a soundproofed theater.

At the entryway to the office is a typewriter. “The name 26 Keys comes from the keys on a typewriter or on the keyboard,” Mr. Hawley said. “There are 26 letters, and if you organize them in whatever order, they will unlock the story. They will unlock the idea, the theme, et cetera. It’s amazing that a small number of letters can create infinite stories.”

Bookcases are on the right and in the background of the frame.

In the office library, designed to be a resource for local creatives, the couple’s extensive book collection is organized by subject and genre.

A short bookshelf wrapping around a white column in a room.

Mr. Hawley has created five seasons of “Fargo,” an anthology loosely based on the Coen brothers’ 1996 Oscar-winning film of the same name. The show, which has garnered 70 Emmy nominations, made Mr. Hawley a bona fide Hollywood A-lister. Props from each season of “Fargo” are scattered throughout his office.

One is a puppet of the actors Jon Hamm and Juno Temple from Season 5. Mr. Hamm played a misogynist sheriff and Ms. Temple played a Minnesota housewife. Puppets were used to depict the TV couple’s traumatic and abusive back story.

“It was important that the audience see this back story, but I didn’t want to show them that moment with actors in real life,” Mr. Hawley said. “So, I thought, ‘Well, what if we do a puppet show?’ It was a herculean endeavor.”

Nearby is a fedora signed by every cast member whose character Mr. Hawley killed, a memento from Season 4. The costume designer J.R. Hawbaker gave it to Mr. Hawley after the season wrapped.

“It really tickled me when I got this,” Mr. Hawley said. “It also reminded me of how many of those characters I killed off because there are a lot of signatures on that hat.”

A home screening room with a pink couch and two rows of three blue chairs behind it.

Housed in his office is a custom-designed screening room, featuring a vintage Herman Miller velvet Chiclet sofa picked out by Ms. Hawley, the creative director of 26 Keys.

“When I first started making ‘Fargo,’ I said that you can’t make a Coen Brothers movie by committee,” Mr. Hawley said. “And, I think the same is true with building and design. You can’t have a committee approach. Someone has to have a vision, and the vision, for this room, was Kyle’s.”

Mr. Hawley sitting at a wooden desk in front of a bookcase near a window.

“Alien: Earth” is the third television show that Mr. Hawley has built around popular intellectual property, or I.P. In addition to “Fargo,” Mr. Hawley created the FX television superhero series “Legion,” which is based on the Marvel Comics character David Haller (Legion).

Mr. Hawley sitting at a wooden desk in front of a bookcase near a window.

Mr. Hawley said he enjoys adapting familiar and prestigious I.P. into television series. “Risk is part of ambition,” he said. “If you are trying to do something big or new, the risk is that it will fail, and I like that feeling. I’d rather fail horribly than be middle of the road. You have to take the big creative swings.”

In Mr. Hawley’s office is a baseball that he takes on location when he is working.

“I always keep a baseball on set with me,” he said. “It reminds me to play because what I do is an act of play, and we are at our purest form of imagination when we play. We have a script, we have the costumes, and we know what we are doing, but within that, let’s play with it. What’s the point if we don’t play with it?”

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