The contrasts start in the entry hall, where spotlights along the floor lend a bit of Hollywood-style glitz offset by the down-home touches: board-and-batten siding on the walls and ceiling beams that had been painted white but, at the architects' direction, were later stripped bare, adding warmth to the white-on-white color scheme.
Determined to stay on budget (please see related story), the couple considered various approaches for completing their half-finished stairwell before deciding they liked it the way it was: unadorned and a bit raw, with an honesty about the materials at hand. Walk up the steps of construction-grade plywood -- not the usual pretty maple of modern home tours -- and one is reminded of just how functional this house is.
Take the kitchen, the heart of the ground floor. Here, vast Fleetwood sliding glass doors lead to patios on opposite sides of the room, filling the space with natural light and fresh air.
"We are very lazy," Choy says. "Unless something is right there, we won't use it. If we want the poolside to be a place where we eat, it better be right next to the kitchen."
Also next to the kitchen: a family room and homework station for the children. The rest of the first floor is composed of a dining room, a living room and a home office, all with views of the pool or the front yard, a low-water garden with ornamental grasses and flowering rosemary under a towering pine.
That connection to the landscape is ever-present. Climb the stairs to the second floor, and a landing looks out to a palo verde tree, aglow in the afternoon sun and perfectly framed by a window above the front door.
Down a hallway in the master bedroom, a traditional Western bed has been replaced by a raised platform with floor mats, the low-lying furniture in stark contrast to the soaring ceiling. The three children share two rooms, leaving the fourth bedroom -- a second master suite with its own fireplace and deck -- for Choy's parents, when they visit from Hong Kong.
The house's footprint covers only a quarter of the lot, but the two stories boost the living space to 6,200 square feet. To reduce energy consumption, the house is divided into four ventilation zones. "During the whole summer there was only one week when we needed to turn on the air conditioning," Choy says. Even then, they needed the AC in just one zone of the house. Much of the credit for the structure's energy efficiency goes to the cement board siding, which not only achieves the farmhouse look but also provides added insulation.
