When general contractor John L. Fox set out to build a spec house on a charming street in Willow Glen, he first considered a crowd-pleasing Tudor style.

But the intimacy of a Tudor didn’t work with what he really wanted in the house _ high ceilings.

So he consulted with his designers, Monty Lucas and Laura Winter.

“What this neighborhood could use is a prairie style,” Lucas said, the style popularized by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

But Fox was reluctant at first.

“It was going to limit who would buy this house,” Fox said. “Not everyone understands prairie style, not everyone gets it.”

He needn’t have worried. A young Cisco executive riding her bike through the neighborhood got one glimpse of it and put in an offer. She not only got prairie style, she embraced it _ with a modern twist.

“The true prairie craftsman,” she said, “can be very dark. For me, that would be hard to live in.”

She hired San Francisco interior designer Carol Grier, who often works with her architect husband Jerry Kler, to complete the vision.

Grier usually sticks to strictly modern projects. But she knew well the architecture of Wright and had toured many of his homes in the midwest. At the same time, she found some of the furniture that Wright designed to be “clunky and heavy.”

For the living room, Grier directed her client, who prefers not to be named, to the furnishings of DeSousa Hughes shown at the San Francisco Design Center, which were “reminiscent of prairie furniture, but a modern version.”

That means softer cushions, more interesting fabrics, a variety of woods, she said. When she showed the homeowner, “she just clicked right into it.”

It also worked with her client’s collection of Asian furnishings and textiles she had collected from her travels, her father’s wood-turned vessels, and her boyfriend’s collection of hunting trophies that fill the upper stairwell.

For the dining room, Grier suggested a substantial table and chairs by Armani, the fashion designer. For the buffet, they chose a toad skin piece by Robert Kuo for McGuire.

With windows in the main rooms that reach eight feet high _ instead of the standard 6-foot-8 _ light penetrates deep into the rooms. That’s a trick, contractor John Fox said, he picked up from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Architecture, Craftsman, Decorating, Dining Room, Interior Design, Julia, Peek of the Week, San Jose, Willow Glen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.