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"View Slideshow\n\nIt's called Harbor Country now\u2014a trademarked appellation coined nearly 30 years ago by boosters who envisioned their picturesque sliver of land, only 60 minutes from Chicago, as a future vacation home haven. Their work paid off, their hopes came true, and the term caught on. But architect Margaret McCurry, a native Chicagoan, recalls a time when the string of quiet, family-friendly communities along Lake Michigan didn't have a marketing plan. \"Back then,\" she says, \"this part of southwest Michigan was just called Southwest Michigan.\"\n\nWith her husband, Stanley Tigerman, McCurry is a principal of Tigerman McCurry Architects and a bona fide member of architectural royalty in Chicago, a city so justifiably proud of its design history that it named a downtown street after Mies van der Rohe. But she also has roots in this tiny corner of Michigan, near the Indiana state line, where she and Tigerman have maintained a home for many years. She first began building here\u2014for friends, and then later for friends of friends, as word spread\u201420 years ago; now she can't take a leisurely drive through the wooded lanes of Harbor Country without frequently passing one of her creations.\n\nOne of them, a lakeside getaway for a young family, isn't too hard to spot: It's the only three-and-a-half-story, metal-roofed, sapphire-blue house on the block. McCurry's clients wanted to make a bold chromatic statement; when she showed them a nearby house she'd built, whose tongue-and-groove cedar siding was painted a bright lipstick red, they loved what they saw (see Architectural Digest, May 2005). But copying the color would have been a faux pas. \"That pretty much left yellow and blue,\" says McCurry.\n\nBlue it was, and blue it is: a shade that celebrates the joyous meeting of lake and sky. This is a house that encourages\u2014one might even say insists upon\u2014engagement with its environment, thanks to a profusion of windows and glass doors that soak practically every square inch of the interior in light and allow for fantastic views: not only of the lake but also of the Galien River, which feeds into it, and the surrounding protected wetlands.\n\nThe views inside are impressive, too. McCurry\u2014who majored in art history at Vassar before becoming an architect\u2014knows how to achieve dramatic effects by framing her spaces, forcing the eye to take in various elements one at a time rather than all at once. A visitor entering from the front door, for example, looks up a small flight of stairs and sees, at eye level, the dining table, which sits at the intersection of the house's north-south and east-west axes; the image is cropped tight so that one has no choice but to regard it independently before ascending the stairs and situating the dining area in the context of the larger axial plan.\n\nMcCurry takes great pride in providing what she calls \"little encounters, little surprises,\" and here they abound. There probably aren't many houses, for instance, where a dinner guest would be happy to spend the entire meal staring at the underside of a staircase; in McCurry's hands, however, it becomes a bold architectural element, hovering over the space between the entrance hall and the dining area, every bit as hypnotizing as a Donald Judd sculpture. Or consider the way she turns an ordinary walk up a flight of stairs into a mini-event, with clever window placement that creates an atrium-like effect in the main stairwell and gives brief, tantalizing glimpses into other rooms. When was the last time architecture inspired you to pause, appreciatively, along a staircase?\n\nIf this house could be said to have a unifying geometric element, it would have to be a grid. Small, square windows\u2014which have become a sort of McCurry signature\u2013pop up regularly on all the floors. \"Often we'll use square windows without muntins, and if you pile up a bunch of them, it gives you the effect of a single oversize muntin\u2013so you get a kind of modern version of the old-fashioned window grid,\" she says.\n\nOn the second floor, a master suite and a pair of children's bedrooms open to a lake-facing deck that runs the full length of the house. The rooms are simply designed and just as simply decorated; these are spaces for relaxing after a long summer's day spent walking along the dunes or wading in the gently lapping waves. But just above this floor is yet another surprise: The attic isn't an attic at all, but a loftlike wing containing two guest rooms and a family room. The clients' young children\u2014and anyone with a childlike love of small, cubbyhole spaces\u2014can't help but thrill over the unique touches McCurry has added up here, including a string of knee-level windows just below the eaves and a pair of window seats, the perfect spot for a kid's afternoon nap.\n\nThough she's filled this house with delightful details, Margaret McCurry has also made sure to instill it with the logic that is fundamental to her ethos. \"Axiality is a very important part of my work,\" she says. \"I want it to be the case that you can always sense where you're going when you walk down the stairs or turn a corner. It creates a sense of calm. But I also like to play with it\u2014just a little.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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