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"   VIEW MORE PHOTOS    Photo: Jack Thompson    There are lots of ways a new house can enhance a person&amp;#039;s life. But James and Carolyn Robertson&amp;#039;s new residence\u2014on a prominent lot in Houston&amp;#039;s museum district\u2014is enhancing the life of a city. The Robertsons&amp;#039; double-height living room, with a sleekly curved wraparound mezzanine, can hold 250 people, easy, and the stair landing in the corner of the room (above right) can double as a podium\u2014it&amp;#039;s visible from both the upper and lower levels. Among those who have spoken on that landing is Illinois senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, for whom the Robertsons hosted a successful fund-raiser in June. There have also been events here for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the local parks conservancy, the Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research (giving Carolyn, who was treated there after a brain hemorrhage last year, a chance to offer thanks) and other organizations. The Robertsons (he&amp;#039;s a lawyer; she&amp;#039;s a computer programmer) have always been civic-minded, but their new house, they say, has given them the chance to do more for the causes they believe in. If the house has helped the couple connect with the community, it has also helped them connect with their son, Christopher, who designed it\u2014his first major project in Houston, where he grew up. Until his parents beckoned, he and a partner ran a small practice in Austin that had won a number of design awards. Now he joins a long roster of master builders who have designed homes for their parents, including Robert Venturi, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier. And, like theirs, his debut is auspicious. Click here to view the resources for this article.    Photo: Jack Thompson  Although it consists of one dramatic room after another, the house, Robertson says, was designed from the outside in. After all, the building faces Mecom Fountain, a civic treasure at the edge of the city&amp;#039;s beloved museum district. Opposite the fountain is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (consisting of a distinguished beaux arts building, with an addition by Mies van der Rohe and a new structure by Pritzker Prize winner Rafael Moneo). Robertson wanted to make sure his work would hold its own against those illustrious neighbors. And yet, having grown up in a modest suburban home, he didn&amp;#039;t want the house to be pretentious. His solution: use large blocks of beige granite and wide expanses of glass\u2014materials that suggest civic architecture\u2014but in an asymmetrical arrangement that stops short of self-importance. The walls of glass served another of Robertson&amp;#039;s goals: that the interiors have a dialogue with their surroundings. Given the prominent location, and his desire to create community, he says, &amp;quot;I felt almost a moral imperative not to make the building interior-focused.&amp;quot; Of the living room, he told his parents, &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t hide in this room; you&amp;#039;re part of the life of the street.&amp;quot;  But other sections of the house are more secluded. From the living room, two long, narrow wings reach toward the back of the site: One contains the master bedroom suite; the other is devoted to the kitchen and den (downstairs) and guest bedrooms (upstairs). Between the wings is a courtyard, visible through the living room, as if an extension of the public spaces around Mecom Fountain.    Photo: Jack Thompson  Designing the house, Robertson angled its long, narrow wings toward each other to avoid destroying any trees on the 11/2-acre site. Particularly important was a giant water oak estimated to be a century old that shades the courtyard. He not only made sure to steer clear of its trunk and branches but raised the master bedroom three feet off the ground (building it on piers rather than on a concrete slab, the usual Houston approach) to spare its roots. But it wasn&amp;#039;t just the tree that benefited. Raising the room gives his parents a chance to look down from their bedroom at the courtyard, which Robertson designed as carefully as he designed the house. &amp;quot;Architecture,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;is at its most potent when it&amp;#039;s creating high-quality outdoor spaces.&amp;quot; According to Robertson, his parents didn&amp;#039;t make a single demand, except when it came time to design the kitchen (across the courtyard from the master bedroom). Like many architects, he wanted to avoid upper cabinets, which he saw as compromising the clarity of the space, but Carolyn insisted on them. When Christopher held his ground, she started crying. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a tactic other clients might not use,&amp;quot; he jokes. His mother got upper cabinets, but Robertson made them practically invisible and gave the room dramatic architectural features that make the cabinets recede even further. He also hid the oven in an alcove and the dishwasher and refrigerators behind unmarked panels. The result is a kitchen that does its job while maintaining the clean lines and careful proportions that Robertson insisted on. In that way, it&amp;#039;s a microcosm of the building.    Christopher Robertson&amp;#039;s Inspirations Twenty years ago, Renzo Piano designed one of Houston&amp;#039;s most important buildings, the Menil Collection, an art museum that is acclaimed for its architecture as much as for its excellent collection. At the time, Christopher Robertson, who lived nearby, was 12 and wasn&amp;#039;t even thinking about a career in architecture, he says. But years later, while attending architecture school at the University of Texas, he went to work for Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa. What he learned was the importance of knowing how to build what he designs. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a reason they call it a workshop,&amp;quot; he says: The space is filled with scale models, full-size mock-ups of architectural details and all kinds of experiments in new materials and methods. Last April, Piano returned to Houston to celebrate the Menil&amp;#039;s 20th anniversary. After Piano spoke, he was feted by the museum&amp;#039;s directors. The location? The home of James and Carolyn Roberston. It was a full-circle moment for Christopher, who was seated next to his idol and who has proven that, he too, knows how to build things.    Click here to view the slideshow. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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