In the early ’60s, Francis Mechner, a behavioral scientist, began seeing his fellow academics buy houses in Usonia, a tract of warm, modern homes in Westchester County designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his disciples. In 1966, he decided to join them. He and his wife, Vicki, settled on the Bier House, a home designed by the Wright-trained Kaneji Domoto, with a terrace that circled a tree. They adored the home, which is still in the family, but a few years later found themselves outgrowing it, with a fourth child on the way. Meanwhile, Francis had spotted something that entranced him in another house nearby — an indoor pool that doubled as a hothouse garden.
He wondered if he could build a house from scratch that had a similar indoor-pool-slash-garden but also a bedroom for each child. His vision evolved when, at a car dealership, he saw a plexiglass dome. Maybe the pool could be round and topped by a circular dome, he thought. And maybe the house could spiral around it. He loved the idea of how, if he stood in the living room, he could look one way and see a tropical garden and look the other way and see a wintry landscape. “That was my original conception,” Francis says. Fortunately, Vicki shared his vision, and they hired an upstart architect named John Koster to carry it out. When a broker took them to the land, a three-mile drive north, pheasants scattered. “It was wilderness,” Francis says. “Magnificent, ancient forest with rocks and crags and precipices and streams.”