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"View Slideshow\n\nHeaven,\" wrote Henry David Thoreau, \"is under our feet as well as over our heads.\" The architect Nancy Copley, who specializes in designs inspired by unusual natural sites\u2014the heaven under our feet\u2014built an extraordinary house for herself in Accord, New York, in the foothills of the Catskills. When she first walked the 50 acres of wooded land on which she now lives, she felt \"magic\" in its fieldstones, brook and \"trees growing out of sculptural forms of the earth,\" she recalls. She immediately saw where to situate a house\u2014on the slope of a hill above the brook\u2014and the organic form it would take: four tri-angular planes folding into a diamond, with the quadrants facing the points of the compass. She and her husband bought the land.\n\nThat was 50 years ago, long before the word green designated anything more than a color, but Copley knew she would be taking her cues from nature. The couple spent weekends in an old farmhouse on the property, commuting from New York, where she worked as an architect, he as an engineer. They gutted and rebuilt the farmhouse. She mapped out plans for a new residence made of wood, glass and stone. To learn stone masonry, she built an interim stone-and-glass house, which she sold. In 1972 the pair moved to the country full time, and Nancy Copley opened an architectural practice in the Hudson Valley.\n\nWork on the new structure began in the late 1970s\u2014first, excavation for the cellar (\"We disturbed only two trees,\" Copley says proudly), then construction of a stone tower that anchors the house. Building the tower, eight feet wide and 43 feet high, took six years. She selected individual rubble stones from a local quarry that had supplied bluestone slabs for the sidewalks of New York. She and her husband worked together, using plywood forms, scaffolds, cement, steel cables, pulleys, an eyebolt and a tractor\u2014but he died in 1984, before the tower was complete. By then Copley had learned enough engineering to continue on her own. She bought an old pipe crane with a 90-foot boom to hoist enormous oak beams that had been milled by a friend with a band saw.\n\nThe 3,000-square-foot post-and-beam house she moved into in 1987, while it was still under construction, has a diamond shape when viewed from above and few parallel lines. Its redwood siding has been recycled from old wine vats. Two floors of glass-paneled walls slope outward from the cellar at a 63-degree angle, and the angle where the copper roofing meets the walls is greater than 90 degrees. The house's second level is three feet wider than the first.\n\nFrom the parking area, two paths lead downhill to separate entrances. One path, made of bluestone slabs, descends alongside three pools of gurgling, recirculating water to the oak front door. To the right as you enter the house is a magical indoor garden under an eight-foot-wide skylight of sloping glass. Water lilies float in a pool; bamboo stalks and a fig tree grow toward the sun. The architect set two bedrooms and her office on this first level, with the woodworking shop and a geothermal heating system in the cellar below. The other path\u2014wooden stairs and a bridge\u2014takes you to a counterweighted glass pivot door that opens into the kitchen, under a three-foot-wide skylight running from the roof's eaves to its peak, on the second level of the house. Copley uses this door most of the time.\n\nBeyond the kitchen, a great room comprising the living, dining and music areas occupies half of the second level\u2014two triangular quadrants, with a grand piano, floods of sunlight and a soaring sense of space. For the floors, Copley used chestnut boards made from old barn beams. She \"floated\" an English-walnut cabinet of her own design by attaching it to six-by-eleven-inch diagonal oak posts. And she commissioned dining and low tables from internationally renowned woodworker George Nakashima.\n\nAn open staircase with spalted-maple treads leads from the first-floor entrance, by the interior garden, all the way up to a balcony that overlooks the living room. Copley had a pipe organ designed for the balcony. (She began studying organ in her 40s: \"I'm always into the learning process,\" she says, in something of an understatement.) The bluestone tower makes a spectacular appearance as a backdrop for the organ and as a chimney for a fireplace facing Nakashima's low table and stools. The descending line of the organ's brushed-zinc pipes follows the rake of the roof.\n\nThe kitchen, a medley of oak and stainless steel, takes up a third quadrant on the second level. From a Nakashima breakfast table next to the indoor garden well, you see trees, glass roof and sky. Sitting there on a rainy day feels like being under a waterfall. Below the garden roof, Copley grows herbs in a 10-foot stainless-steel planter hung from a girder and uses an apple picker to harvest Muscatine grapes. She set her bedroom adjacent to the living area, in the fourth quadrant, where the other side of the tower serves as a wall. Her bath, including a linen closet, shower and spa, is inside the tower. Nearby, she built a thatch-roofed barn, shaped like the house, where she raises alpacas. She has dammed the brook to create two ponds.\n\nBecause of the architect's nature-based approach to design, this house conceived half a century ago looks astonishingly contemporary. And, like most organic forms, it continues to evolve. Two decks, off the living area and office, have yet to be built, as does a greenhouse next to one of the ponds. What happens after that? \"Oh, I'll think of something,\" Nancy Copley replies with a laugh. \"I like to have construction going on.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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