ceiling of its underbelly delineate a cozy lounge area tucked to the side of the immense space. Thanks to the variety of such implied “rooms,” the house can feel intimate with only two people — Ehrlich lives there with his wife, Nancy Griffin, a movie executive — but it can also accommodate site-specific dance performances with 100 guests.

Like earlier regional modernists, such as Vladimir Ossipoff in Hawaii or Paul Rudolph in Florida, Ehrlich draws on both ancient knowledge and new technologies to get closer to nature. Mutable in response to changing conditions outside, the house brings to mind Le Corbusier’s famous dictum that a house is a machine for living. Doors can enclose or vanish. The shades, which run over the top as well as down the front of the frame, can form a tent-like enclosure, not only mitigating sunlight, but redefining the exterior space of the pool courtyard. Billowing in the breeze, they bring a kinetic energy to the solid forms. Like a rock cave, the shadowy interior can approach to the very edge of a blinding explosion of sunlight and heat, but remain coolly unconcerned.

“Nothing makes me quite as happy as opening and closing doors and tuning the house up as the sun and weather change,” says Ehrlich. “It’s like an instrument.” There’s a definition of a sustainable environment, perhaps: responsive and perfectable, by hand.
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