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"View Slideshow\n\nDesigner Sara Story's Proustian Madeleine\u2014the thing that can instantly transport her back to happy times\u2014is the sound of bells, which bring to mind her childhood and the clanging that called her and her sisters to dinner at the family's ranch in the Texas Hill Country. That 500-acre spread was a cherished anchor throughout the Manhattan interior designer's peripatetic youth\u2014an oilman's child, she was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore and Houston\u2014and she wanted a place that would offer similar experiences for her daughter, Dagny, and sons, Edward and Duke. Says Story, \"The city is good for a global perspective, but I want my kids to get dirty and be around animals, snakes, and spiders, the way I did with my sisters.\"\n\nSeveral years ago Story decided to establish her own Hill Country home, cobbling together some 400 rugged acres alongside her father and stepmother's holdings. Thick with gnarled live oaks and junipers and foraged by white-tailed deer, collared peccary, and turkeys, Story's property came with a spectacular feature: a boomerang-shaped double mesa that spreads across 100 acres. All the land needed was a house for spending long weekends and holidays. But not the usual ranch house\u2014no burly beams, no barn wood, no rock chimney breasts.\n\nDeparting from the norm seems to be a family trait. Story's father, Edward T. Story Jr., had hired the San Antonio architecture firm Lake|Flato two decades ago to build an unconventional residence composed of small limestone pavilions arranged around a picturesque watering hole. His daughter desired something even more unusual. As might be expected from a woman who flies to Thailand every year to play championship polo\u2014on elephants.\n\nInitially Story shied away from using the same architects as her father, but she was ultimately persuaded by the firm's reputation for sensitivity to scale, siting, and materials. Brian Korte, a Lake|Flato partner, calls it a match made in heaven. \"Sara wanted a house that was crisper and more refined than her father's, and my colleague Vicki Yuan and I were looking to design something more contemporary,\" he says. \"Rooting a building in the landscape is our firm's baseline, but every project has to reflect the place, the time, and the client.\"\n\nIn this case, that meant a client whose preference for lean, cerebral luxury was deepened by working for interior designer Victoria Hagan (Story struck out on her own in 2003) and whose far-flung fascinations include Adolf Loos's 1930 Villa M\u00FCller in Prague and Finnish designer Paavo Tynell's whimsical postwar lighting. Story is also passionate about the smartly renovated farmhouses found throughout Provence, France (she and her husband, Kenneth Garschina, often summer there with their children), especially the earthy-chic formula of limestone walls and metal windows with latticework screens that splinter the strong sunlight onto cool concrete floors. Luckily, those ingredients mesh neatly with Lake|Flato's landscape-conscious aesthetic and the firm's admiration for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Glenn Murcutt, the Australian Pritzker Prize winner.\n\nThis cocktail of influences pervades the buildings that Korte, Yuan, and Story brought to fruition over three years at the SK Ranch, as the property is known. A long, lazy drive rises up along the mesa's edge, rolling past a compound of finely tailored edifices that knit creamy Texas limestone together with vast sheets of glass and panels of black zinc or black-painted wood siding, all set off by the intense greens of the vegetation.\n\n\"The idea was to create unique destinations and flexible spaces,\" Korte says. \"You can have an incredible meal in any one of these buildings.\" The first structure on the drive's ascent is an airy tennis pavilion with an exposed framework of ebony-tone I-beams; it's followed a few hundred yards later by a poolhouse that nods to Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion. Farther up the drive stands a discreet guesthouse with a dining area wrapped by louvered walls that pivot open to the landscape. Finally the family's L-shaped two-story residence comes into full view, placed atop a small plateau that takes in magnificent vistas that look like they haven't changed in a millennium. At one end of the building is the children's wing, which is connected to the main block by a loggia furnished for living and dining.\n\nFor her part, Story has decorated the ranch's sunny high-ceilinged rooms with a keen eye for uncommon 20th-century furnishings. In the large, airy living/dining room, for instance, an ultramod Raymond Loewy cabinet makes a groovy counterpoint to a set of brooding Jacques Adnet leather chairs. A few steps away is the kitchen, a darkly glamorous space where a flowery brass pendant light by Tynell gleams above a marble-top breakfast table surrounded by classic Thonet bentwood caf\u00E9 chairs on three sides and a leather-cushioned banquette on the other; enormous louvered wood screens over the windows create a film noir\u2013style interplay of light and shadow.\n\nThe decor of the bedrooms is equally unexpected. In the children's quarters, one room offers white-lacquer bunk beds that resemble modernist Pullman berths, while in the daughter's space a hand-painted wallpaper swarming with butterflies alternates with nearly floor-to-ceiling windows. \"My husband insists Dagny got the best views in the house,\" Story notes with a ringing laugh. That might be true, but the designer ensured that the nougat-color master suite is a beguiling cocoon. Here, the exterior's limestone cladding is echoed in walls covered in similarly sized rectangles of suede that serve as an unobtrusive but unmistakably luxurious background for enigmatic canvases by Antwerp artist Kati Heck and Warsaw-based Tomasz Kowalski.\n\nAltogether, the SK Ranch is a delightfully individualistic, undeniably sophisticated take on country life. But as Story had hoped when the project began, her daughter and sons are fascinated far more by the great outdoors. And, she adds, they come home just as dirty\u2014and happy\u2014as she did as a child.\n\nTour decorator Sara Story's sprawling Texas ranch, designed by AD100 architecture firm Lake|Flato."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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