The owner of this Tuscan paradise allowed us to photograph it on the condition that he wouldn’t be named in our coverage. I don’t blame him – I’d probably want to keep this unspoiled retreat all to myself, too. Let’s just say it’s near the university and located on three acres but not visible from any major thoroughfares.
Finished in 2006, the 6,000-square-foot home was conceptualized four years earlier. After a one-year planning process, it took three years to construct. “It was a very difficult structure to build,” says the owner.
The owner, a single man, had traveled to the Mediterranean and knew that was the style he wanted to build after he demolished a 1950s split-level home previously located on the property. The Tuscan look is accomplished with slathered bricks on the exterior, limestone columns, groined vault ceilings and roof tiles that came from an old Pennsylvania prison roof. When Bobby McAlpine of McAlpine Tankersley Architecture in Montgomery, Alabama, was suggested to the owner, he traveled to Belle Meade near Nashville, Tennessee, to see some of his work.
Once McAlpine was hired for the job, the two of them talked about the owner’s way of life. McAlpine heard the owner say over and over again how important two things were – convenience and open space. Having grown up in a circa-1900 home in Tennessee, he wanted tall ceilings and large rooms as opposed to lots of “cut-off space.” “I like the inside and outside to be continuous,” says the owner. “You shouldn’t feel like you’re going from one place to another.”
The owner, a retiree who works part-time as a business consultant, spends most of his days by the pool (or underneath the pavilion by the pool watching TV) and his evenings on the back balcony.
The outdoors never feel far away with 50 glass doors throughout the house acting as windows. In fact, there are only four small windows in the entire structure.
“I can change a door into a window by putting a piece of furniture in front of it,” says the owner, “but I can’t do the opposite.”
The glass brings a liberal interpretation of “Tuscan” to the structure. “A lot of people misuse the adjective Tuscan,” McAlpine says. “When people ask for something Tuscan, they are really asking for the lifestyle of the region. The fact is, in an American interpretation of that, we want so much more glass.”
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