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"Dirk Denison couldn&amp;#039;t help but be inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German-born architect whose masterworks include the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Denison has taught at IIT for 20 years, and his reverence for Mies comes through clearly in this Marin County house. Its central courtyard resembles Mies&amp;#039;s glass and steel Farnsworth House\u2014turned inside out.  But Denison had an even greater inspiration than Mies: a teenage boy named Max, who was born with cerebral palsy. When Max&amp;#039;s parents, Leslie and Marc Cohodes, asked Denison to design the family&amp;#039;s house just outside San Francisco, the architect was struck by the boy&amp;#039;s tenacity. Outside the house, Max uses a wheelchair; inside, he mostly crawls. Denison was determined to create a house where every floor is on precisely the same level and where there isn&amp;#039;t even a threshold to disturb Max&amp;#039;s movements.   To Denison, the house would have to exceed the merely functional, to be glorious from Max&amp;#039;s perspective: a house whose glass would come down to the floor, not stop at windowsills over Max&amp;#039;s head, and whose ceilings would be worth gazing up at. Mies talked about universal spaces, but it&amp;#039;s likely that even he never anticipated spaces as universal as the ones that Denison designed for Max, his sister, Emily, and their parents. Says Leslie, &amp;quot;For me, the house is beautiful; for Max, it changes his world.&amp;quot; The Cohodes family moved to California on short notice, when they found a school that was particularly helpful to Max. With a tight deadline, they bought a Spanish colonial house that Leslie says was &amp;quot;grandiose and overbearing\u2014everything we&amp;#039;re not.&amp;quot; But the 1.25-acre lot was unusually level for Marin, which meant it was big enough for the single-story house they hoped to build someday.  A few years later, when they began interviewing architects, Denison was the first &amp;quot;who was a modernist but really got the warmth thing,&amp;quot; Leslie says. Denison&amp;#039;s scheme was to create a house with as many courtyards as rooms\u2014and with views through one to the other. The idea, he says, wasn&amp;#039;t just to embed the house in the landscape, but to embed the landscape in the house. The entry would be near the center of the house, at the end of a long exterior walkway, as close as possible to every room that Max might need to get to. And there would be no standard hallways, which would be both difficult for Max to maneuver and anathema to Denison, who envisioned a &amp;quot;village&amp;quot; of interconnected spaces.  In the courtyards, landscape architect Andrea Cochran avoided flowers or even frilly foliage, complementing Denison&amp;#039;s architecture with what she calls &amp;quot;spare geometry applied to vibrant plant life.&amp;quot; As for the indoor spaces, interior designer Laura Blumenfeld helped Denison and Leslie Cohodes (who once worked in sales for Knoll) choose classic pieces in a neutral palette. The meticulous architect also created many built-ins, because Max can lift himself onto a stable banquette far more easily than onto a chair. Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;White Open Spaces&amp;quot;.  Although he chose to reference the surrounding redwood forest by covering the house in cedar shingles, there is nothing rustic about Denison&amp;#039;s design. He planned the location of every shingle on the outside of the house and every tile on the inside. In fact, the whole structure is built on a strict grid, which determined the location of even the smallest element. &amp;quot;The contractor loved it,&amp;quot; says Denison, &amp;quot;because if something was out of place, he knew it right away.&amp;quot;  The architect&amp;#039;s approach also involved taking maximum advantage of the sun\u2014the master bedroom faces east, for morning light\u2014while keeping the materials palette tightly focused. The headboard, the bed and the home&amp;#039;s wooden built-ins are made of English sycamore; most of the floors are white oak. In the bathroom, the same limestone used for the floor and the custom sink ascends the wall behind the tub. And if you&amp;#039;re trying to avoid frills, it helps to give every bathroom (especially the master, above) a private courtyard, an architect&amp;#039;s way of making sure the client will never have a reason to hang curtains.  But the house contains surprising flourishes. Ceilings are folded along diagonal lines, some of which recall the work of Daniel Libeskind, with whom Denison studied at Harvard. The folds conceal both skylights and fixtures, allowing the house to receive light in a variety of forms\u2014&amp;quot;some reflected, some refracted; some direct, some indirect,&amp;quot; says Denison. The result is an ethereal environment, where rooms are bathed in luxuriant light. What the Pros Know  As large as it is, the entire house has radiant heating, which, Leslie says, means there will always be warm floors for Max. But there is no air-conditioning, a choice the clients made on both aesthetic and environmental grounds (without AC, there&amp;#039;s no ductwork inside and no noisy equipment outside). Luckily, Denison&amp;#039;s courtyard design means most rooms enjoy adequate cross-ventilation. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s amazing airflow,&amp;quot; Leslie says. And to make the air flow even better, Denison gave each room a powerful exhaust fan that vents out through the roof; they are the equivalent of attic fans, which were popular before the advent of air-conditioning and may become popular again. As Leslie explains, &amp;quot;After a hot day, you turn on the fans at night and bring in the cool air, and then you close everything up. The next day it feels fine.&amp;quot; Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;White Open Spaces&amp;quot;. Click here to see the resources. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/home-remodeling-renovating/a3963/white-open-spaces-a-60503/>