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"View Slideshow\n\nBefore Washington, D.C., architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen designs a house, he has clients complete a \"program outline\" for the future residence. \"I ask them how many bedrooms they require, how many books they want to accommodate and how many pairs of shoes the woman of the house has,\" Jacobsen explains. \"If they're still hiding shoes under the bed when the house is complete, I haven't done my job.\"\n\nJacobsen then proceeds to take his clients through a second exercise. He has them jot down, in order of priority, the elements they deem most important. He suggests possible answers, among them, \"Four bedrooms, each with a bath,\" or, \"A bedroom lined with fish tanks.\"\n\nA couple in Nashville had been living in a 1950s ranch house for a dozen years. During this period they had clipped many magazine articles featuring Hugh Jacobsen houses, and they considered his style \"a perfect fit of modern and traditional.\" They then bought a three-and-a-half-acre piece of sloped land with a small house on it and lived in it with their two sons while waiting for Jacobsen to design their new residence. At the top of their wish list was a soccer field for their boys, who are now 10 and 13. \"They'll soon be grown,\" Jacobsen told them, but the soccer parents simply repeated that the playing field had to measure 120 feet by 60 feet. \"I guess the kids are prospective jocks,\" Jacobsen concluded. \"The husband also said, I want the house to blow the socks off Nashville.' \"\n\nJacobsen is renowned for houses that resemble the small green ones that come with Monopoly. Sometimes his steep-roofed pavilions are separate blocks; sometimes they are linked. For the Nashvilleans, seven joined pavilions climb the hill together. The first contains the entrance hall. The third and fourth\u2014which share a level\u2014are for a garage adjacent to the kitchen and dining area. \"I wanted a garage that didn't look anything like a garage close to the kitchen,\" the wife says. \"I don't enjoy schlepping groceries.\" The three pavilions at the back of the house, which face the soccer field, contain bedrooms for the boys, a living room and the master bedroom and library.\n\nThe bedrooms have 10-foot-high ceilings and 10-foot-high windows and doors. \"In an ordinary house, the ceilings are eight or nine feet high, the doors are six feet, eight inches high, and the space above them looks dreadful,\" Jacobsen says. As in all of his houses, the rooms appear even higher than they are, because Jacobsen uses no baseboards, chair rails, crown moldings or window trim. \"Your eye doesn't stop,\" says the husband, who has a graduate degree in architecture but currently works in commercial real estate. \"The rooms have an unbelievably vertical feel.\"\n\nJacobsen is partial to built-ins. \"Hugh made us realize we'd have to get rid of almost all our old furniture,\" says the wife, who owns a small business. \"Our sons' bedrooms have built-in drawers and closets. Ours has built-in drawers, and there's a closet area between our bedroom and our bathroom, so all we have in the bedroom is a bed, two night tables and a 19th-century sugar chest that was in my husband's family. The sugar chest, a piano in the living room and several paintings were among the few pieces Hugh said would work in this house, and he was right. We sold most of our other furniture and knickknacks. The house frees you from stuff.\"\n\nInterior designer Katy Chudacoff, of Dovetail Design Works in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, took the wife to Atlanta to purchase the few pieces the couple wanted for their new home, including eight Mies van der Rohe side chairs for the dining area, a Saguaro Cactus side table by Larry Laske and two Saarinen Womb chairs and ottomans for the library and four Tibetan rugs.\n\nJacobsen approved of his clients' choices. \"I never met the designer, so there was no chance for our egos to clash,\" he says frankly. He adds that the Nashvilleans were a joy to work with because of the husband's architectural training\u2014\"He never tried to take the pencil out of my hand\"\u2014and the couple proved unusually receptive to the many \"Hugh-isms\" that distinguish Jacobsen's homes. \"I put light switches at 36 inches because if you put them at the standard height of 48 inches, they look like hell on a wall,\" he comments. \"My wall plugs are six inches above the floor, and I turn them on their sides: They go away when you install them horizontally. I place bathroom cabinets off the floor, so they appear to float. Makes the room look better, and you can kick your scale underneath.\"\n\nJacobsen has a strict color palette: Sherwin-Williams pure white (for the interior) and extra white (for the exterior). The front door could be deep blue, deep green, white or fire-engine red, but not one of the shades Jacobsen abhors\u2014which include brown. The couple chose red. The house sits far back from the street, but the red door and the dramatic white pavilions attract drivers-by to the only house in Nashville he has ever designed. \"When we open the front door, visitors say, Wow,' \" the husband comments. \"Wow\" is Jacobsen's favorite reaction.\n\nWhen the house was nearly finished, Jacobsen flew down to see it. \"I asked the husband, Are there any socks left on in Nashville?' and I was delighted when he answered, Not a one.' \""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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