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" VIEW MORE PHOTOS     Photo: Carlos Domenech  Nothing is as you might expect it to be in Marlene and David Green&amp;#039;s townhouse. It is not a pristine white box filled with spare, pure furniture, nor is it in any way traditional. It&amp;#039;s a winter vacation home with the requisite level of elegance a sophisticated Chicago couple would desire, and yet at the same time it is high-spirited, an exuberant ode to the pleasures of discovery. &amp;quot;After all, we do have a certain kookiness about us,&amp;quot; the lively Marlene is the first to admit. She and her husband wanted a design that was &amp;quot;edgy and stylish and yet comfortable,&amp;quot; and to achieve that she turned to the Chicago-based Martial (he uses just a single name), a rising star on the Chicago scene whose designs are represented by the prestigious Holly Hunt. &amp;quot;He is a genius with space,&amp;quot; Green exclaims. &amp;quot;He sees things that others don&amp;#039;t see.&amp;quot; The tall and narrow four-story townhouse offered the mercurial Martial the opportunity to show off his expertise, allowing him to manipulate scale and juxtapose styles in a way that\u2014as in an Alice in Wonderland adventure\u2014large seems small and small seems large. Click here to view the article&amp;#039;s resources.  Early on, Green determined that she would try to furnish the house with furniture bought in Miami\u2014&amp;quot;at least 75 percent of it.&amp;quot; She and her designer, both comparative strangers to the city, cut a wide swathe, scouring Miami&amp;#039;s growing group of 20th-century design stores and prowling the Sunday flea market on Lincoln Road. The flea market yielded one fantastic find. It&amp;#039;s a more or less classical 1950s table with a new decoupage veneer\u2014pages of an antique dictionary. &amp;quot;Little by little we found the nicest shops and the nicest people,&amp;quot; Martial says. A longtime image consultant, Green had thought about a second house in Europe but needed to be able to get to and from Chicago more easily. Miami seemed the perfect place. &amp;quot;It is the only city in the United States where you feel like you&amp;#039;re in a foreign country,&amp;quot; she says. On advice of friends she checked out Aqua, the modernist housing enclave developed by Craig Robins on a small island in the middle of Miami Beach. Aqua has a dense, new urbanist plan from Duany Plater-Zyberk &amp;amp;amp; Company that encourages walking and interaction. It also boasts designs by some of the country&amp;#039;s leading modernists and emerging architects. The Greens&amp;#039; townhouse falls into the latter category: It&amp;#039;s the first built work of Adolfo Albaisa and Kristopher Musumano.    Photo: Carlos Domenech  Client and designer confronted a concrete box with little but the bathrooms and kitchen finished\u2014a perfect blank canvas for the endlessly inventive Martial. His first move was to make the box mostly white\u2014walls, window treatments, ceilings, floors\u2014with an exception: For contrast and drama one wall in each room is black. Floors are clad in as-large-as-possible slabs of Tassos white marble, &amp;quot;the only truly white marble in the world,&amp;quot; Martial says. White is cool but not cold, and it is the perfect backdrop for an adventurous mix of furniture\u2014old and new, serious and irreverent. For example, a silk-covered Christian Liaigre sofa in the living room is flanked by two 1950s renditions of Louis XV chairs. &amp;quot;They are very kitsch,&amp;quot; says Martial. &amp;quot;Even the gold on them is too gold.&amp;quot; A key unifying element of Martial&amp;#039;s design is the &amp;quot;cage&amp;quot; that runs four stories alongside the stairway: two rows of stainless-steel cables installed almost as if they were a work of art (see opening spread). It not only defines the stairway but pulls the house together, he says. Among the other pieces Martial designed for the house is a dining room table with a concrete top that seems to float above a Lucite base. It is also a punctuation point in the Greens&amp;#039; message to their guests. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want to have the kind of house where if someone spills something, it&amp;#039;s a crisis,&amp;quot; says Green. To add to the mix, the dining room chairs are contemporary versions of a Louis XIV design, each gilded with a seat upholstered in a subtly different hue ranging from pink to terra-cotta. The French connection was in effect, too, when Martial selected the extra-large 18th-century candlelit lantern in the living room. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s completely disproportionate,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;but I like it.&amp;quot; Another Martial invention can be found in the living room, where he installed rows of round porthole-size mirrors along the one black wall. The mirrors are actually designed to let drivers see oncoming traffic in the tight corners of parking garages, and it is likely that this is their only residential use to date. &amp;quot;This is a vacation house,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and it needed to be elegant, but it also had to be very different.&amp;quot; Very much like the man who created it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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