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"View Slideshow\n\nAccording to the old Shaker hymn, \"'tis a gift to be simple,\" and simplicity is the hallmark of a recent house by Margaret McCurry that puts a fresh spin on the rural vernacular of the Midwest. For the architect it recalls the weekend cottage that she and her husband, Stanley Tigerman, designed for themselves a few miles away in the Harbor Country of southwest Michigan. Called a \"lovable house\" by Vincent Scully (see Architectural Digest, April 1984), the structure was made up of geometric forms, clad in corrugated metal and lattice, that evoked local barns and silos, as well as the medieval basilicas and baptisteries the two had admired in Italy. Some neighbors protested that it was a sly joke by city slickers, but the controversy died away as the house achieved wide fame, winning both architects commissions from other urban escapees in what was formerly an impoverished region.\n\nMcCurry's clients, fellow Chicagoans Joan and Irving Harris, already knew the area, for two of her sons have houses nearby. Joan Harris decided it would be an ideal location in which to gather three generations of the family, and the couple purchased a well-wooded twenty-three acre property that straddles the Galien River. McCurry was a friend, and Joan Harris admired the architect's talent for listening as much as she did the warmth and restraint of her varied buildings. \"I wanted a house that was wonderful but wouldn't make anyone's jaw drop,\" Joan Harris explains, \"rather, something that was comfortable, classic and child friendly, where we could entertain or hang out by ourselves.\" She also insisted that the materials be durable and require little maintenance.\n\nThe Harrises, whose foundation supports the arts and early education, have a vintage lakeside apartment in the city and a second residence in Aspen, Colorado, both furnished in a mix of modern and craft pieces. Mc- Curry embraced the rigorous modernism of Skidmore, Owings Merrill during her eleven years in that huge corporate office, but she has since developed a deep appreciation of vernacular architecture. \"Relying upon order and symmetry, I seek to compose places that achieve calm and comfort,\" she wrote in Margaret McCurry: Constructing Twenty-five Short Stories. The two women found themselves in agreement on the essentials, and it was easy to see that the house should be strung out along a ridge. An existing house on the site was retained to accommodate guests and reduce the volume of the new structure.\n\nThe long, axial plan begins with a single-car garage and expands outward, a room at a time, before narrowing, like the sections of an extended telescope. The design evolved in response to practical and aesthetic concerns. Joan Harris loves to cook and wanted an open kitchen incorporated into the living/dining area. However, to access second- story bedrooms, McCurry proposed a narrow, slightly tapered staircase, in an erudite allusion to Bernini's Scala Regia in the Vatican. This feature provoked a radical shift in the plan. As the architect explains: \"For Joan, who had grown up in an old house in Connecticut, the stair had to open out of the living room, so that people going up and down could be part of the family experience.\"\n\nPushing the kitchen to one side and adding an enclosed porch alongside the large living area served to fatten the midsection of the house. Needing more height to balance the proportions, McCurry designed a central great room with clerestories to pull in natural light and, where they extend into the master suite, to provide space for sleeping lofts for grandchildren. Harris agreed to the upward expansion, but she was concerned that parties in the lofty space might prove too noisy. As a precaution she brought in an acoustician, who recommended a double layer of drywall to absorb excess sound from a crowd of guests.\n\nGlimpsed from across the property's several man-made ponds, the house has the rambling, picturesque character of a farm that has been built piecemeal, but up close it snaps into focus as a set of extruded sections that step in and out from the spine. The siding of corrugated galvanized steel is flipped outward to canopy windows, and the end walls have a grid of concrete tiles. These crisp angles are softened by a screen of trees and plantings of long grass and hardy perennials by landscape architect Maria Smithburg that enrich a mass of rhododendrons bequeathed by a former owner of the site. A nostalgic touch is the red trim that recalls the painted barns and clapboard houses of New England.\n\nThough Shaker simplicity may have inspired the initial design, the interior is understatedly sybaritic. The great room is a more expansive, elegant version of the one McCurry and Tigerman created for themselves. Paired openings lead into and out of the great room, to either side of the staircase and fireplace, which are framed by maple panels that extend into the pitched vault to suggest obelisks. Architect and client jointly selected the eclectic mix of modern furniture, which Harris enriched with Navajo baskets and contemporary craftsmanship. She asked Lee Lyon, a friend from Aspen, to think of Kasimir Malevitch, the Russian pioneer of geometric abstract art, in creating four cast-glass tabletops that echo the grid of the limestone paving. She brought in another friend, Sylvan Shemitz, to design the lighting.\n\nIn her book, McCurry writes that her work \"has gradually evolved into a synthesis of modern classicism and eccentric romanticism.\" The Harris house is undeniably modern and rationally romantic, pared down but not austere, referential without being literal. The architect is fond of Winston Churchill's comment that \"we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.\" This house will become a memorable passage in the lives of everyone who stays there, infusing them with its timeless strength and serenity."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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