As engineers, homeowners Al Khotanzad and Sogand Shoja-Khotanzad lead busy lives without time to travel as often as they would like. So when building their new residence on a wooded 1-acre lot in Dallas, they sought the ambience and style of a relaxing resort. “They wanted to live at home with the feeling of being on vacation from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.,” explains architect Jason Erik Smith, who worked on the project alongside partner Signe Smith. Rounding out the design team, designer Brant McFarlain, builder Barry Baldwin and landscape designers Michael Dickerson and David Hunchik also signed on to help make the couple’s dream of an at-home getaway a reality.
Meeting all of these needs within a resort-like setting resulted in a plan for a newly built home Jason Erik Smith “intended as a delicate balance: to make it work for both a party of 150 and for just two to four people,” he explains. The design wraps around the backyard, allowing for large expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass while maintaining privacy. The shade from several mature live oak trees and sizable overhangs in front and back creates ample outdoor space protected from the elements as well as interior spaces with a bounty of natural light yet very little glare. "There's a lot going on orientation-wise that subtly makes the interior environment pleasant with those huge expanses of glass," Jason Erik Smith says, referring to the deep roof overhangs and other architectural elements that minimize direct sunlight. "You want that connection to the outdoors, but it shouldn't come at the expense of harsh light or too much heat."
In addition to the glass that ties in the outdoors and lets in natural light, the home's signature material is a cream- toned Texas shellstone incorporated indoors and outside, imparting a calm and tranquil feeling. "It's a fossilized limestone, with lots of imprints from crustaceans and shells,” Baldwin explains. “It’s a very porous, textured stone. When you have a beautiful material like that, it’s such a centerpiece.” The shellstone influenced the palette for the entire home, from the stain on the floors to the countertops.
Outside, the landscape serves as a quiet accompaniment to the architecture. Situated on a corner lot, the house is set back from the street amid a grove of mature live oak trees, which—along with a lush array of plantings, from ferns and hydrangeas to flowering dogwoods—contributes to the relaxed setting the owners had envisioned. “This home has graceful, organic yet modern architecture,” Dickerson says, “and we created complementary landscapes with clean, calm and wide-open spaces.” Though the home has proved to accommodate large fundraisers—allowing visitors to mingle around the piano with glasses of wine in the spacious entry area or outside around the pool under the overhangs—it also manages to be snug enough for the owners to gather in the great room or the master suite in the evening surrounded by luxuries typical of a boutique hotel. From having tea in a sitting area outside the bedroom in the morning to standing on the second-floor balcony, “right under the canopy of the trees,” Sogand says, “it really does have a resort feel.”
–Brian Libby