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"View Slideshow\n\nAt a design studio jury at Princeton several years ago, Michael Graves encountered a student having a bit of trouble. \"He was trying to devise some privacy in a space that was quite leaky\u2014a modern space like the Barcelona Pavilion,\" the celebrated architect recalls. \"The student said, I can't quite figure out how to close it,' and I said, Well, you might try making a room.' There was silence.\"\n\nThat day at the university, Graves was restating in its simplest form the truth that led him to depart decades earlier from the modern company he was keeping and establish himself as a leader of the countermovement that came to be called postmodernism: There are limits to the challenges that a house, or any building, can mete out. \"I was pretty good at it, but I knew that people never lived like that, with two or three crashing geometries,\" Graves says of his own avant-garde, \u00E0 la mode student work. \"That was a great experiment, and it certainly helped me get good grades.\"\n\nThere are no geometries crashing here, in this gracious weekend retreat in the New Jersey countryside outside Princeton that Graves designed with his associates John Diebboll and Robert Miller\u2014not unless one counts time-honored moves like the play of a minor and a major axis, or the use of an octagonal drum to turn the latter to create an L shape, here grabbing two sides of a gravel court. The long wing is divided into three pavilions housing bedrooms above and communal spaces below and organized around a single rod-straight hall.\n\nGraves refers to the hall as \"the main street\" of the house. \"It's not oppressive because there's so much to do along the way,\" he says, stressing the distinction between rigor and rigidity. \"The plan is so important in my work, and it ought to give you options for living.\"\n\nAt this house, the options begin at the main entrance, where three sets of identical doors lead from the court. The owners most often choose the door to the right, which leads to a spacious mudroom with built-in benches. The main, more ceremonial entrance, through a central pavilion, opens into a small entrance hall (sized, Graves says, to allow \"two couples to take off their coats at the same time\"). This wonderful little room is an open-topped wood box set within a glowing double-height space. The stairs to the second level wrap around the outside of the box and emerge so quietly at either side of the door that a visitor can be drawn into the house without even seeing them.\n\n\"I'm always fascinated by stairs,\" Graves says. \"I hate them.\" If so, it's a hatred to good effect. The house's other stair, at the center of the shorter wing, rises from a family room adjoining the pool terrace to reach the guest rooms above. It is set into a wide bay, the entirety of which is filled with giant steps sized for sitting; intermediate risers create a walking-friendly stair up the middle. It's a stonesimple move, and it works\u2014as a respite from formality, a place to play and a cue that this is a place to relax; when the Ping-Pong table is put to use, the steps serve as bleachers.\n\nBetween the family room and the main body of the house is that octagonal drum\u2014a two-story tower of wood-framed glass. Lit on six sides and shaded by a pin oak, this is the hub of the house in plan and in action\u2014a space where family members gather to live the life that the house, by getting out of the way, allows them to live.\n\nThat was also a concern of interior designer Victoria Hagan, who was seeking to enhance communication between the architect, whom she has long admired, and her clients. \"Michael Graves's houses are fun, elegant and strong,\" she says. \"They have a lot of integrity.\" Hagan sought to achieve a comfortable informality, she says, through the use of handwoven carpets and simple textured fabrics in an organic palette. \"My goal was to keep things calm,\" she explains. \"It's a weekend house. It gets a lot of use.\"\n\nThe house is low-key and functional, but it is far from inert. To Graves, that was one message of his intricate entrance hall: \"I just wanted people to know that they were in a place that would test them.\" The tests throughout are of the most gentle kind: a forced-perspective niche at one end of the second-floor hall; the surprising and beautifully executed white-plaster barrel vault over the master bedroom; the splashes of blue tile in the baths. Though the house does nod to a local farmstead vernacular, there is the emergence of one of Graves's old demons\u2014his fascination with a rustic Mediterranean elegance. \"It remains a friendly demon,\" he says, before recounting a long-ago day with friends on the grounds of a country house in Tuscany. \"It was the most wonderful feeling, and I've never been able to re-create it.\"\n\nGraves's clients may get the chance. Along the south side of the house is a continuous plateau, buttressed by rough stone walls. Two wide chimneys\u2014clad in copper in a pattern that evokes massive masonry\u2014rise to define the rear fa\u00E7ade. Between them, the architects have built a strikingly stocky construction out of square cypress posts and lintels\u2014porch below, balcony above, trellis on top. Like the rest of the house, it is designed to disappear and, by its disappearance, to confer a use and mood. \"I wanted to make a place where the terrace would spill out from any of the spaces,\" Graves says, perhaps feeling again that elusive Italian day. \"As the wisteria grows on that trellis and people sit there in the summer\u2026it could really be quite nice.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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