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"View Slideshow\n\nThe most beautiful word in the English language is semiretired. Ideally it should always be followed by the phrase \"in Santa Barbara, California.\"\n\nHere is a house certain to keep the dream alive. It was designed as the victory lap for two entrepreneurial spirits, a place for eucalyptus-scented evenings by the outdoor fireplace and long lazy baths meditating on the setting sun. Surrounded by reflecting pools and fountains and ponds filled with flowering plants, it is lotusland in Lotusland.\n\nIt was quite a journey here for Robert and Alexandra Nourse, who built The Bombay Company from one store to 450 before bowing out several years ago. Sophisticated barely describes this couple. He is Canadian; she is Dutch; they have lived all over and been everywhere else. For people like the Nourses, \"semi-retirement\" invariably begins with a project, in their case finding the world's most agreeable spot and building a house that was its equal. No place was beyond consideration. The south of France seemed a little too far. The west coast of Canada was a little too rainy. Florida was a bit steamy. La Jolla came very close. But Montecito\u2014the loftiest part of Santa Barbara\u2014was perfect in every way.\n\nPeople had been trying to buy this acre of land for 30 years. An isolated knoll with views in all directions, it is one of the finest building sites in the area, says Jack Lionel Warner; and in five decades of architectural practice in Santa Barbara, having designed hundreds of houses, he has rounded a lot of switchbacks to gauge the potential of many a hilltop. Yet, says Alexandra Nourse, \"a great piece of land is not enough. You still need imagination.\"\n\nThis was not the place for Old California charm under an orange-tile roof. \"The site called for a contemporary house,\" Warner says. \"The views suggested a lot of glass, and when you try to put a lot of glass into a traditional house, it really doesn't work.\" The interior designer Barbara Barry had an equally strong first impression: \"Sometimes decoration is the main event, but not in this case. The DNA of this house is in the site. The site comes first. Architecture and form come next. This is casual living at its most interesting and sophisticated. It calls for the most understated rooms that do not compete.\"\n\nThe house, about 7,200 square feet in all, feels like a cluster of pavilions, with the flow that is Warner's signature. \"I like to build up to the main room,\" he says. \"Often you walk into a giant, impressive hall, and then the main room is a letdown. This living room has a 14-foot ceiling. It draws you in.\" Starting with the rough-hewn front doors, copied from an old Indian cabinet, the mood of the house is constantly but subtly changing. There are huge rooms and friendly rooms and high ceilings and cozy ceilings and bright rooms and, for a respite, a fully wood-paneled media room, with no windows at all. They are connected with the lightest touch, with pocket doors that simply disappear, expanding and contracting as seven children and grandchildren \"in various states of attachment\" come and go. Notably, every hallway ends in a window, with a view either natural or man-made. Warner says, \"I like to see a glimpse of a view before I get to a view.\"\n\nThose glimpses are forever stopping you in your tracks; and often, they are of water. \"Being Dutch, I grew up with water, and I find it calming,\" says Alexandra Nourse. Integral to the architecture, extending its rooms and strengthening its axes, are a swimming pool, a reflecting pool off the library, a wall fountain outside the kitchen and a pair of lotus ponds adjacent to the outdoor living room. Sculpture gives each water feature a distinct personality. There is a clay figure, by Susan Low-Beer, that seems to be doing a deep yoga bend before the most inspiring of views; and a pair of elliptical bronzes, by Aristides Burton Demetrios, that connect in an optical illusion when viewed from indoors. \"They're meant to be us, in harmony with our surroundings,\" Robert Nourse says.\n\nBy now you are wondering, where is the Bombay Company furniture? Like many in the design world, the Nourses have had many decorating lives, coming full circle from contemporary to English to French to Asian and back to contemporary. Through them all, Alexandra Nourse had always wanted to work with Barry. \"Barbara had, when it wasn't as common as it is now, a clean, calm luxury that was not ostentatious,\" she says. Barry, who likens her decoration to the favorite white shirt we always come back to, says, \"A designer is there to awaken the senses. And when you awaken the senses, you need less.\"\n\nThe Nourses already had all the charm the new house needed in their collection of mostly Asian antiques. Barry provided the background, with the tailoring and strong lines that are unmistakably hers. She explains: \"My basic sofa is very neutral. All the furniture in this house is the mama, the baby, the sister, of that sofa. You don't really notice what you're sitting on.\" But of course you do. The interior is very much alive, which Barry attributes to the light, an inescapable subject in Southern California. \"It's such that you perceive every subtlety,\" says Barry.\n\nThe couple had always wanted a house where, Alexandra Nourse says, \"every window would be a picture.\" Now the Pacific coast is framed by their living room, and the heathery coastal range by their bath. They see gently moving water and glistening sculpture every time they walk from one room to the next. Sometimes you feel as if you're in the south of France. Sometimes you feel you're in Bali. Sometimes you get a rush of Southern California. The one place you are never reminded of is the office."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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