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"View Slideshow\n\nThe Maison Martin Margiela store in Beverly Hills, California, is Los Angeles architecture studio Johnston Marklee's flashiest work to date\u2014literally. Completed in 2007, the fashion boutique is covered in what look like metal sequins but turn out to be white plastic disks that gently flutter in the breeze kicked up by traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. \"It is a high-tech effect achieved by low-tech means,\" says Mark Lee, who founded the firm with his wife, Sharon Johnston, in 1998.\n\nFinding simple routes to complex architectural pleasures is the pair's stock-in-trade. Their celebrated residential projects\u2014 commissioned by adventurous clients, manipulated from geometric shapes, and named, for the most part, with one suggestive word (Hill, Vault, View)\u2014showcase the strength of thought over luxury. \"If we have a secret, it is in how we economize design energy,\" Lee says, referring to his office's tried-and-true tactic of concentrating the wow factor in precise doses as petite as those Margiela paillettes. The results, he explains, are \"buildings where people can feel the difference but can't put their finger on it.\"\n\nFor the View House, outside Rosario, Argentina, that difference comes in the form of decisively placed windows that cut into the curved concrete shell, blocking out the neighbors while framing earth and sky. The angular Hill House in L.A.'s Pacific Palisades hugs a steep slope, jutting out so as to maximize volume but maintain a modest overall footprint. And the Vault House, now under construction on an oceanfront plot in Oxnard, California, packs a series of soaring barrel vaults into a long, narrow box, thus allowing residents to catch a glimpse of the water even from the street side. \"The master bedroom looks through the living area and borrows its view,\" Lee notes.\n\nBorrowed landscape is also a theme of the firm's most prestigious commission yet: the future Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection in Houston. By notching the new structure into the shade of existing trees, the duo intends to blur the boundaries between the outside world and the dimly lit galleries. \"We wanted a gradual progression from exterior to interior as opposed to a matinee effect,\" Lee says. Subtle things, after all, can have a not-so-subtle impact.\n\nClick here for an extended slide show of Johnston Marklee's innovative projects."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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