In fact, the parti for the Douglas House is a top-down solution. This home, as the architects envisioned it, would be entered from the road by crossing a bridge connected to a door just below its roofline. Once inside, owners and guests are presented visually with views of the home’s soaring four stories, a deck at each level, and the forest and lake beyond. Below, a path leads them to a private beach. Where the Smith House proceeded upward, the Douglas House falls away in a cinematic promenade. “It was an interesting way to design a house – to come in at the top and work your way down,” says architect Frank Harmon. The bridge announces that this house plan and entry sequences are like no other. “You arrive at the top and it’s pretty cool – suddenly you’re thrust out, floating out over a vast lake, much like being in an airplane,” Williams says. “You feel like you’re 1,000 feet up, but it’s only 50.”

Meier and Williams developed the initial solution with rough sketches that were refined and handed off to others in the studio. “Sherman Kung did all the technical drawings for the house,” Williams explains. “John Colamarino did the more formal drawing development – he took the sketches I would make, and was involved in making the paper models in the studio.” Kung, whose drawings Williams calls “exquisite,” would later work with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners on the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and establish Sherman Kung & Associates there in 1981. Colamarino would set up his own modernist practice, John Colamarino Architect, in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1983. Kung and Colamarino were key players – and unsung heroes – on a team that created plans and drawings for one of the most iconic homes on the planet today.

The Exterior

In the field of architecture, some designers treat every new project as a tabula rasa – a blank slate – beginning anew without precedent or common language. But early in his career, Richard Meier essentially drew a theoretical circle in the sand, and dedicated his work primarily to whiteness, opacity, transparency, and glass. In the years that followed, the architect has pursued those elements relentlessly, earning criticism from some, but high praise from others. “I think it’s very admirable that he did that,” says architect Frank Harmon, who worked in Meier’s office in the 1970s. At the Douglas House, Meier blended all four elements masterfully on the home’s exterior – for good reason. “I wanted it to be open with views of this great site looking out to the water,” he says. “And I wanted a way to go from the house, down the stairs, and down a path to the beach.”

The design had evolved before project architect Tod Williams arrived on site, alone, in the summer of 1972. Meier’s philosophy was on his mind. “I was thinking about the challenges and opportunities we found on site, but I was also trying to imagine what Richard would want to do,” Williams says. And he did. Its white-painted wood and glazed exterior owes much to Meier’s Smith House on the Connecticut coast – as does its relationship of opacity to transparency. “In his early buildings, Meier basically used the same building plan – they’re opaque for one-third, and glass for two-thirds,” architect Frank Harmon says. “It was a very workable strategy.”

The exterior stairway at the Douglas House is an integral part of the home’s design, cantilevering out and over a precipitous landscape. The stair’s handrails are meticulously crafted, following Mies van der Rohe’s well-known precedent of stairs and railings at the Illinois Institute of Technology School of Architecture in Chicago. "Mies and Meier’s designs created a splined and continuous curved design that followed the movement of a person climbing or descending the stairs," architect Henry Smith-Miller says. "The trick lay in offsetting the stair’s treads." But Meier wanted the exterior of his house to be photogenic, too. “In the design phase of all his buildings, he thought about how they would be photographed,” Harmon explains. “He was a master at marketing – every project had photo angles built into it.” Today, the Douglas House is a work of art from every perspective – even from above.

The Interior

The entire Douglas House is a series of cascading experiences designed to delight the senses. They begin at roadside with an enticing white vision, then extend across a redwood bridge toward a bright blue door. Inside, a processional downward sweep guides the eye to vistas outside. “Every floor is a different view of nature created by an architecture that’s elegant and beautiful,” says owner Marcia Myers. “It’s like a tree house – there are 180-degree views of water and sky, and eagles flying by.” The kitchen and dining room hover among trees. “Sitting inside, you see the floor and roof and skylight above,” she says “The feeling of light is spectacular, in all four seasons.”

Because the home is open on all floors, there’s a feeling of one level merging into another – and ultimately into a single grand space. “You can sit in the living room and look up to the office, or all the way up to the entry light on the top level,” says owner Michael McCarthy. “There’s this great sense of openness.” Myers and McCarthy are awed by the precision of the architects’ work. “You have to be in it to see all that – visitors, even those who’ve studied it, comment that pictures and words cannot describe the experience of actually being in the space,” Myers says. “It’s a piece of art, simple and minimal – and the way they arrived at all that is amazing.” The couple can open windows to hear waves breaking on the shore, or close them as a storm approaches. “You marvel, as you walk through it, at how spectacular it all is,” she says. That’s because it was designed as a portal – to open up from inside to outside.

The Details

The first challenge in constructing the Douglas House was how to anchor it to its site – a hillside composed of rock and shale. Just as the house began in late spring of 1972, its foundation was changed from a stepped one to piles driven into the steep hill, a challenging engineering feat. “There was a crane operator who drove the piles, who was a real cowboy on the machine,” says project architect Tod Williams. “He would get the crane to reach distant areas by tipping it up on just two large rubber wheels, cantilevering out over the steep slope and hammering the piles into the hill.”  Many were skewed severely, some exploded as they encountered boulders, and others shot off randomly into the woods. “The resulting support structure was a chaotic forest of creosoted telephone poles,” Williams says. “I was inclined to leave it exposed, but the house was cantilevered so far out that we added the skirt – Richard Meier said it needed to be closed in, and he was right.”

The home is clad in wood, through and through – with a very taut skin. “The contractor, Jordan Shepard, was a fine artisanal worker from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he drove his crew over 200 miles to the site every week,” Williams continues. “He was an intelligent and wonderful man, and the house is an exquisite piece of carpentry.” Williams added climbing rungs to the exterior, because he wanted people to experience and explore the sculptural structure, up and down. “Much like a tree house, you would want a way to descend into the forest,” he says. “If you were at the bottom, you could use it as a sculpture to climb on.” 
More conventionally, Meier designed two sets of stairs – one for the interior and another for the exterior. They were part of his overall design concept – an exploration of interior and exterior spaces. And as he notes, they’re design details that are part and parcel of the house itself.

The Architects

In 1971, Jim and Jean Douglas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, reached out to modernist architect Richard Meier in New York. They’d read about his Smith House in Connecticut, after seeing it on the cover of Architectural Record magazine in 1968. And they wanted a residence like it for themselves, built on their lot in Harbor Springs, Michigan.

“They’d seen it and loved it, and they wanted the openness and transparency that exists at Smith,” Meier says.

Alas, the head of the architectural committee at their chosen subdivision vetoed the idea of a white house – a Meier trademark. So the couple began looking for land elsewhere. And they found it – on a much more dramatic site.

It was a steep slope, conifer-covered and overlooking Lake Michigan. The Douglases toured it with a realtor – and bought it. Meier reviewed it, thought about it for a time, then dispatched Tod Williams, his employee and former student at the Princeton University School of Architecture, to Michigan. He would become the project architect. The new house was destined to be a forward-looking evolution – a cousin, not a copy, of its predecessors. “One of the tasks when I arrived at Meier’s office was to assist Ezra Stoller in the photography of the [1967] Hoffman House,” Williams says. “Stoller had photographed the Smith House, so knowing of the early houses was an important entrée into Meier’s design thinking.”

With Meier in the New York studio and Williams on site during the summer of 1972, the pair traded initial sketches back and forth. Later, Williams would send drawings to the studio, where Meier, Sherman Kung, and John Colamarino would work on the home’s further evolution. The four architects would create a residence that some call Richard Meier’s best. “The nicest things about it are the quality of light and shadows – and the reflective light from the lake,” says architect Frank Harmon, who was practicing in Meier’s office during the 1970s. “It’s a very beautiful, sculptural object.”

Meier would become the youngest recipient of the Pritzker Prize, at age 49 in 1984, then win the AIA Gold Medal in 1997, the same year the Meier-designed Getty Center in Los Angeles opened. In 1986, Tod Williams would co-found New York City-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the firm currently designing the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Their design for the Douglas House, bright white and freestanding, simultaneously contrasts and complements the deep green of the surrounding forest, as well as the sapphire blue of Lake Michigan. It is an architectural masterpiece.