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"View Slideshow\n\nBlame it on Bhutan. In 2005, Siri Marshall, then the chief legal counsel for General Mills in Minneapolis, was feeling slightly left out. \"My husband and daughter had gone off trekking in Bhutan,\" she recalls. \"So I flew out to California to spend a long weekend in Santa Barbara.\" While there she toured a house for sale in nearby Montecito, where the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore have homes amid the chaparral and gnarled oaks of the rocky Santa Ynez Mountains, overlooking the Pacific.\n\nThe Marshalls had been contemplating places to retire, and this sun-washed landscape, reminiscent of a Van Gogh painting, seemed the perfect antidote to Minnesota's terrain of lakes and gently rolling plains. \"I didn't love the house so much, but I loved the property,\" Siri notes. So with her husband, Bob, wandering other hillsides halfway around the globe, she purchased it. \"Luckily he was very happy with it when he got back,\" she says, laughing.\n\nThey hired local architect Christopher Manson-Hing, who persuaded them to tear down the existing structure and build something more to their taste. \"Santa Barbara is famous for its Spanish-Mediterranean style, but they wanted a cleaner look with plenty of access to the surrounding land,\" says Manson-Hing. The new three-bedroom villa, with generous expanses of glass and wide loggias supported by classical columns, graces the mountainside like a modern temple. The sense of space and calm continues inside, where, instead of moldings, Manson-Hing installed narrow recesses around the tops of the walls so that the ceilings almost seem to float. Nearly every room has steel-and-glass French doors that open onto the terraces, which are scattered with teak and wicker furniture offering a front-row view of the epic scenery.\n\nFor the decor, the Marshalls turned to Los Angeles designer Suzanne Rheinstein, who created interiors infused with her trademark relaxed, old-world panache. \"The landscape is constantly changing with the mist and sun,\" Rheinstein says. \"We wanted everything inside to be nuanced and slightly faded to capture the shifting light.\" To achieve this effect, she painted the walls in sandy shades, laid down antique carpets blanched with age, and used bleached teak for paneling in the family room and cabinetry in the kitchen.\n\nThe Marshalls are keen collectors of art and antiques\u2014Siri has served as a trustee of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Bob is on the board of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art\u2014and Rheinstein has crafted an ideal backdrop for their exquisite array of pieces. Glazed Han-dynasty wine jars form the bases of two lamps in the living room, and a vivid fragment of circa-1800 painted Chinese wallpaper is displayed above the limestone mantelpiece (Bob spent time in Japan as an exchange student in high school, which sparked a lifelong passion for Asian works). Juxtaposed with the Far Eastern items is an assortment of 19th- and 20th-century Western art. Across the living room, three small Santa Barbara\u2013area landscapes by the American painter Lockwood de Forest are flanked by French doors affording views of the real thing. In one entry hall, a pair of 19th-century Japanese scroll paintings hangs near a stark bamboo-and-rope sculpture by Robert Rauschenberg that is mounted in a small alcove. And throughout the house are antique furnishings, including many Italian pieces, like the dining room's 19th-century walnut chairs and the living room's velvet-clad neoclassical settee.\n\nYet as lovely as the inside is, the outside is always beckoning. Bob, a former lawyer for the publishing industry and an avid gardener, teamed up with landscape designer Carol Puck Erickson of Santa Barbara's Arcadia Studio, who gave the two and a half acres a lush look while still adhering to California's strict environmental laws. \"The Marshalls and I are originally from the East Coast,\" Erickson notes. \"We wanted to create that feeling you get when you hike in damper areas out there.\" They added walls and terraces across the grounds and charted pathways that meander through the undergrowth. \"I can walk barefoot all the time now,\" Siri says of the soft meadow-esque trail that winds its way down the hillside. At the base of the steep property is a brand-new pond, surrounded by bog plants and a willow.\n\n\"We wanted to let nature sneak in and dabble with the edges of the house's disciplined composition,\" Erickson says. To that end, a mature oak was transplanted to the kitchen terrace, and tall bent grass reaches toward the residence in graceful arcs.\n\nAlthough the couple does some entertaining here\u2014it was the site of their daughter's wedding reception\u2014the home is primarily a place of private contemplation. \"Sometimes the mist comes up the hill from the sea so that only the tops of the mountains are visible,\" Siri says. \"It becomes very Zenlike and peaceful.\" Perhaps Bhutan wasn't so distant after all.\n\nClick here to see the slide show of this Asian-influenced home near Santa Barbara, California."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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