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"View Slideshow\n\nA traditional home doesn't do anything for me,\" Jack Berberian, a Los Angeles supermarket entrepreneur, observes over an after-work cigar, relaxing amid the Robert Graham sculptures and assorted Lichtensteins and Picassos in his 12,000-square-foot contemporary ode to modernism designed by architect Richard Landry. \"Paintings of countrysides don't excite me either.\"\n\nWhat excites him is modernism with a soul. Just as there are no sweet cottage landscapes in gilt frames on the Berberians' ivory-colored walls, the modernism of hard lines and sharp edges is nowhere to be found in the warm, richly textured residence Berberian shares with his wife, Alice, their children and an impressive array of modern masters.\n\nThe first floor is transparent, giving the impression that the more solid second floor is floating on glass.\n\n\"When you design a contemporary house, you create your own language and compose with it,\" says Landry, a latter-day Addison Mizner known for deploying a wide array of architectural styles, from Norman ch\u00E2teaus to Italian palazzi, for clients like Wayne Gretzky, Eddie Murphy, Sugar Ray Leonard and Kenny G (see Architectural Digest, August 1997). \"You can be more playful with modern, because you make the rules.\"\n\nIf there is such a thing as homey modernism, the Berberian residence\u2014with its Pennsylvania bluestone, Portuguese limestone and whorled moss-colored granite\u2014may be it. Set in arboreal splendor in a four-acre private park bisected by a meandering brook, the residence combines a Yosemite-like feeling of permanence with the sophistication of an Anthony Caro reclining nude, one of the many stellar works in the Berberians' collection.\n\nSince moving to Los Angeles from his native Canada in 1984, Landry has been a master at reading between the lines of his clients' fantasies. No Landry residence looks quite like any other, which pleases the architect. His architectural persona is a bit like an iPod bearing an infinite variety of music. When a Norman ch\u00E2teau is required, he conjures up reclaimed roof tiles from European castles. For this down-to-earth couple, whose tastes run from Hockney to Armenian painter Hagop Hagopian, Landry started with the trees, a mini-arboretum of mature pines, birches and sycamores preserved and augmented by landscape architect Alan Bernstein. \"The trees determined where the rooms wanted to be,\" Landry says. \"We took full advantage of the property so you could feel the lay of the land.\"\n\nThe approach is full of mystery. The drive weaves through a lush thicket, crossing a bridge over the brook. At night, the two-story glass-enclosed library beckons like a lantern, an Ingo Maurer paper-and-gold ceiling fixture looming like a diaphanous biplane.\n\nInterior designers and architects sometimes repel each other like opposing magnetic poles, but Everage was inspired by Landry's \"elegant machine,\"choosing rugs and fabrics to reflect the naturalness.\n\nNatural materials are the language that gives the residence its eloquence. Bluestones\u2014actually blue-gray, blue-green and beige stones\u2014carry over from outside to inside, stacked and split to exploit their colors and craggy texture. The big architectural gesture is a role reversal: The first floor is transparent, giving the impression that the more solid second floor, covered in hand-troweled stucco, is floating on glass. The architect's rationale is that it is functional as well as aesthetic. The lower public rooms are open to the outdoors; the second level, with its private rooms, including the master suite, \"calls for a bit more opacity.\"\n\nArchitecture is a sorcerer's art; the magic, intuiting need. Alice Berberian, an accountant by training, has a hawkish eye for detail and the ability to read a blueprint. Both she and her husband respond to open, nonconfining spaces. They wanted warmth and intimacy but also the ability to host Thanksgiving dinners for 40 family members or more, bolstered by the Armenian coffee for which she is famous.\n\nThe architect and his clients started with photographs she plucked from magazines over the years. \"You find out what's important to them,\" Landry says of his design modus operandi. \"Is it the window? The carpet? The stair detailing? You start to see a consistency.\"\n\nWorking in concert with John Everage and Janice Francois, of Everage Design, Landry created rooms that are essentially structures-within-a-structure, pavilions, each with a distinct volume. The living room and family room are separated by a freestanding beech divider, conceived as a giant piece of furniture containing a media center as well as an aperture\u2014a classy passthrough that visually frames Roy Lichtenstein's 1980 Head on the living room wall. The dining room, another volume, opens to the outside, where, at night, a huge monkey puzzle tree festooned with moonlight casts shadows across the circular skylight.\n\nInterior designers and architects sometimes repel each other like opposing magnetic poles, but Everage was inspired by Landry's \"elegant architectural machine,\" choosing Tibetan rugs and fabrics, with their subtle striations, textures and hues, to reflect the naturalness of woods and stones. His furnishings recall the work of Jean-Michel Frank, who, like the residence, was \"all about precision and just the right texture.\"\n\nLandry and Alice Berberian toiled together on every detail, from the hidden slot in the open, spalike master bath's shower that magically whisks away water, to the subtle curves of the wet bar and the kitchen exhaust hood (\"Curves are fun,\" Landry observes). In the kitchen, the couple pay homage to the family livelihood with a walk-in refrigerator. \"He not only listened to us, but he heard us very well,\" Jack Berberian says of the architect.\n\nCertain images of the residence linger\u2014the Hockney spied in the second floor gallery, looking as if it grew with the house; the surprisingly intimate two-story library with the marble-slab fireplace. The powder room is a beguiling space that feels like a painting, perhaps a Zen Vermeer, views of trees through mysterious windows enhanced by a tiny Robert Graham sculpture sitting on a granite ledge.\n\nThe Berberians' reaction to the residence Landry designed was symbolized by the sit-down dinner they hosted for his entire office, some 50 people in all. \"The house is so interesting to come home to, I forget about business,\" says Jack Berberian, radiating ebullience. \"Here I feel free."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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