Curve Appeal

HAVING DECIDED TO BUILD A SUMMER HOME on 11 acres they own on a ridge above the Atlantic Ocean in Manchester-by-the-Sea, the couple toured the wooded site one afternoon in the autumn of 1999 with architect Marcus Gleysteen of Cambridge and his colleague, Yossi Zinger. When they looked east toward the ocean, all they could see were trees, and, wondering what the vista might be like from the new house, the four of them stood on a granite rock, on tiptoe, and stretched to see the view.

Alas, nothing was visible but trees.

Today, from their master bedroom on the second floor, the couple wake to glorious sunrises over the Atlantic Ocean, and, in the evening, they sometimes dine with friends in a room overlooking inlets and islands that stretch along a seascape spread before one of the more unusually designed homes along the New England shore.

On that autumn tour six years ago, Gleysteen and his clients were not strangers. The couple had been delighted by Gleysteen's design of an addition to their Brookline home two years earlier, and the architect was grateful for the opportunity to have worked for clients unencumbered by convention and willing to give him license to create designs not corrupted by the need to be culturally respectful and oh-so-safe.

Still, these were not passive clients.

First, as examples of shapes he admired for the design of his summer home, the husband cited the Sydney Opera House and the silhouette of a sea gull against the sky. Among forms he favored was that of the rind of an orange, peeled in one piece and standing alone. And, finally, he wanted a design that was the work not of an architect but of a sculptor, and he admonished Gleysteen: Think of yourself as an artist.

For Gleysteen, this was a fantasy come true. He had started as a sculptor and then had become an architect, and not since he left Cooper Union in 1978 had anyone given him so bold an opportunity to blend those skills.

When construction began in 2001, the first problem was the driveway, 900 feet long, with a rise of 260 feet. Access had to be engineered through rocky outcroppings and designed for safe driving in winter not only by cars but also by large construction vehicles and even firetrucks. Building the road alone took nine months.

Siting the house was simple. The front door faces landward, but with the exception of bathrooms, every room faces the sea.

The two-story, nine-room house involves myriad intersecting lines and loops and rolling curves and finely tuned tints and tones that charm the eye. The exterior is 60 percent glass, which creates, inside, a kaleidoscope of sea and sky, light and dark, shadow and sunshine, all shifting ever so slowly, hour by hour, day by day, season by season.

Sculptural forms, says Gleysteen, are found in the creation of solids that relate to the interior voids, defined by glass, that allow exterior space to flow into and throughout the house.

"The challenge," he says, "was to design a new modern house that did not look like all the other new modern houses that are striving not to look like other new modern houses.

"Through the use of complex curves in plan and simple convex or concave roof forms, we translated the architectural realities of floor plan into free forms in space. We used flat surfaces for floors and most walls, but the organic curves created by nature are found in floor surfaces, stair edges, and walls."

Gleysteen likens the floor plan to that of a human hand with the fingers spread.

"The palm contains the front door and entry space. The thumb is the sunroom, the index finger the kitchen, the middle finger the dining room, the fourth finger the living room, and the pinkie is the library."

This is a house that might not be welcome in every neighborhood, but, as Gleysteen says, its isolation allows for experimentation.

"In New England especially, most modern houses are in the woods or otherwise isolated. In the trade, they're called art houses, and they have a different set of rules. It's rare, for example, that an art house will be a primary residence. If you look at an architectural magazine and find something wild, it's probably not the family's first house or even the second, but perhaps the third, and it's almost always isolated.

For all the artistic indulgences, however, there was a budget.

"The client allocated generous resources," says Gleysteen, "though not unlimited. But this house is about color, form, texture, and light, and, intrinsically, they don't cost anything, so if you make them the priority, you can assemble things in a way that's cost-effective. So, to come up with something structural, artistic, and livable - not too big, not too small, and not too expensive - we did things, as a group, that reduced the budget."

One example is the stairway enclosed by glass panels that rise 11 feet.

"Typically, in using glass sculpturally, the great expense is that it's tempered, and you have to drill it. That means sometimes you have to cast five pieces before you get one you can use. But instead of drilling, we worked with a hightech engineering firm and clamped the glass together, and in the end, something that would have cost $80,000 was $20,000."

"One challenge," says Gleysteen, "was maximizing the amount of glass while being `green.' Despite all the exterior glass, the house meets energy codes thanks to triple-glazed glass with heat mirrors. With windows, air intakes, and registers placed strategically to ensure efficient circulation of air, the house requires almost no air conditioning."

The integration of sculpture and architecture is evident in the roofline, concave from the inside, with a main beam made of pieces of high-strength wood glued in strips and set so that it appears the roof hangs from it.

"Hanging something from a beam is almost as efficient as running something on top of it, and it looks so much neater," says Gleysteen, "because you take something ordinary and make it not so ordinary. From studying modern sculpture and doing a lot of welded-steel sculpture, this assembly of something that is either holding up or pulling down creates dynamic tension, especially around the entryway."

From the front door, a visitor's eye falls upon a three-sided fireplace under a freestanding, cylindrical chimney of brushed stainless steel - 23 feet high - and set off by two granite boulders weighing more than 10 tons. Looking between the boulders, one catches a glimpse of the ocean beyond, an effect that Gleysteen describes as delayed gratification.

Of the disagreements between architect and clients, the greatest involved exterior color. In the end, a decision to use lead-coated copper outside resulted in an agreement on a color unusual for a modern house - red.

As the wife recalls, "At first, my husband wanted it black. Marcus was freaking out about that, and so was I. It was the only time I put my foot down." And now, with the red, both husband and wife think it's perfect.

Jack Thomas is a member of the Globe Living/Arts staff. E-mail him at thomas@globe.com.