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"View Slideshow\n\nThomas Rimerman did not grow the certified public accounting firm his father founded into California&amp;#39;s largest simply by following everyone else&amp;#39;s example. A recognized innovator in the buttoned-down world of balance sheets and tax planning, he also was not about to surrender to conventionality when it came to the design of his residence.\n\nIn the process of acquiring 60 prime wooded acres in Napa Valley, Rimerman and his wife, Gayle, became conversant in the region&amp;#39;s architectural dialects: With the Mission style and simple barn construction as precedents, Italianate, French farmhouse and neo-Craftsman styles primarily make up the current lingua franca of Northern California wine country living. The couple wanted something completely different. Their house would not be replicative but would articulate, in the clearest and most functionally straightforward terms, only the present.\n\nThe central idea for the house &amp;quot;developed as a piece, like a photo in a darkroom: at once but emerging gradually in its complexity.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;We considered several architects, local and international,&amp;quot; Rimerman says. &amp;quot;A designer who had done many offices for my firm and knew my aesthetic and attention to detail suggested Jim Jennings, who was already on our list. Gayle and I invited Jim to our property. It was his intellectual engagement with the site and how he envisioned us living on it\u2014he wasn&amp;#39;t wildly running around with a sketchpad proposing idea after idea\u2014that told us he was the one.&amp;quot;\n\nFor his part, Jennings recalls that the central idea for the house &amp;quot;developed as a piece, like a photo in a darkroom: at once but emerging gradually in its complexity.&amp;quot; The principal of a San Francisco practice known for the coolly sensuous rigor of its designs, &amp;quot;Jim Jennings,&amp;quot; offers Pulitzer Prize\u2022winning architecture critic Allan Temko, &amp;quot;is a true modernist who can&amp;#39;t abide bogus and illogical imitations of the past. Instead, in the spirit of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he believes in architecture as an expression of our own time. His buildings adhere to timeless principles of form and order, proportion and harmony\u2014the way they play with light and sit lightly on the land.&amp;quot;\n\nStraddling a north-south ridgeline at the end of a mile-long private road that wends its way up from the valley floor, the neutrally hued structure, massed as two single-story volumes delineated only by a clerestory and fascia, is fairly inscrutable upon approach. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s not only buildings in direct public view that benefit from a bit of mystery as to what lies beyond the front door,&amp;quot; notes Jennings, who designed the front elevation to give away nothing of the openness and scale immediately visible on the inside.\n\nIn plan, two parallel wings\u2014the living spaces are in the west wing, the master suite, guest room and garage in the east\u2014and an entrance hall as the connecting element form an asymmetrically stretched H. The two roofs (&amp;quot;these insistent planes,&amp;quot; the architect calls them) produce a strong graphic horizontality while the four floor levels step down in concert with the slope of the land. &amp;quot;A traditional way of making architectural space is to manipulate the height and shape of roofs and ceilings,&amp;quot; Jennings explains. &amp;quot;In this case, the ceiling is constant, and by following the topography, the floor creates volumes of varying scale that shift as one moves through the house.&amp;quot; Completing the relationship with the ground is the on-grade exterior access at each level, a significant factor in the overall elision of inside-outside boundaries.\n\nBy adapting the building to the gentle cant of the ridge, Jennings also maximized its exposure to light and views.\n\nBy adapting the building to the gentle cant of the ridge, Jennings also maximized its exposure to light and views. The bedrooms on the east side enjoy early daylight, while the living areas on the west are situated for afternoon light and long vistas. Lining the west elevation and corresponding to the massive glass walls of the living area are cantilevered sunshades that filter the light and transmit soft, streaming shadows (trees surrounding the house perform a similar function). Most important for the presence and quality of light throughout the interior, however, are the translucent bands of clerestory windows that bounce light off the ceiling and back onto the walls. A unifying device, the clerestories allow even the areas where there is mostly solid wall a natural, diffused glow.\n\n&amp;quot;You always have a shifting and intensification in the general distribution of light at night,&amp;quot; observes Jennings. &amp;quot;The large glass walls could have been overwhelmingly dark if not for the concentration of light on other interior surfaces.&amp;quot; Says architectural lighting consultant Dan Dodt, who designed the house&amp;#39;s lighting system, &amp;quot;In a space like this you want to respect the intent of the architecture and not overreach in the natural-versus-artificial equation. I think of the nighttime illumination as simply referencing the relationship between the building and light that one experiences in the day.&amp;quot;\n\nIn contrast to the enigmatic front fa\u00E7ade, the interior spaces are strikingly informational. From the glazed entrance hall, where the view extends through the tree court out to the pool terrace, guesthouse and bocce court, to the living areas (from which the couple wanted to be able to see pieces of the exterior architecture), transparency is the dominant theme. The skin wrapping each side of the main volume is a massive glass wall girded by steel-framed columns. The black grid, which nicely balances the polished-concrete floors and white walls, controls the outlook and then appears to visually vanish as the impact of the vista plays out. Portions of the steel columns (&amp;quot;in a cruciform to adapt to all the conditions of solid and glass walls, intersections and corners,&amp;quot; says Jennings) are exposed in an expression of the basic structural system. Countering the steel is the architect&amp;#39;s generous use of glass\u2014and its seeming weightlessness.\n\nConfigured one right after the other in a series, the spaces inside and out establish an almost breezily casual circulatory pattern. The terraces, particularly, were conceived as extensions of the interior and for the easy flow of multiple groupings of guests. Gayle Rimerman serves on several nonprofit boards, and the couple host variously sized fund-raising events. The house takes on an expansive mien when they entertain; most often, the interlocking of the main areas (public and private) caters effectively to an informal living style and to a desire\u2014expressed at the very first meeting with their architect\u2014for a serenely intimate environment.\n\n&amp;quot;A Tuscan villa would have been the expected thing for us to do,&amp;quot; acknowledges Thomas Rimerman of his design choice. &amp;quot;Yet the purest form of beauty is something that gives you inner peace\u2014such as modern architecture, which is not cold or corporate but Zen-like in its soothing power. In that sense, modern is the ageless style.&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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