Carrie Niederer's designers snickered when she gave them a budget to redo her house located just outside the town of Sonoma. They giggled when she presented them with the glossy images of modern and daring houses she'd clipped from upscale shelter magazines. She especially liked one by Cass Calder Smith, 43, a rising architectural star acclaimed for designing restaurants such as LuLu and Rose Pistola. The 1998 home was not overly fussy, she thought. There was nothing pretentious about it.

When she showed the picture to one of her designers, "The woman just laughed," Niederer, 50, recalls. " ‘He's famous,' she told me. ‘He'd never do your house.'"

Undaunted, and perhaps naive, Niederer flipped open her phone, dialed the number of Smith's San Francisco studio, and left a message.

"Not an hour later he called me back," she says, with more than a trace of satisfaction.

But gratification had been a long time coming. In 1995, she and her husband and son had moved to a nondescript house graced with a few sturdy walnut trees on land just outside Sonoma's city limits. The house was perfectly livable but had "zero charm," she says. She assumed they would eventually renovate or replace it. Several years passed. No new house. Then came the divorce. Splitting from her husband, Niederer got custody of the ungainly starter home in the settlement. Now free and independent, she proceeded to redo her house.

But finances were tight. After sending her two former designers packing, she invited Smith to visit Sonoma. He saw her property's appeal immediately.

"Carrie has such a nice site that I really wanted her and her son to be able to live in the middle of it and enjoy it all year," he says. "I [designed for them] a pavilion to live in and set it within the grove of walnut and pepper trees."

As they began their collaboration, Niederer could tell that Smith would be a fully engaged partner. "I didn't know anything about anything about building a house," she says. "You talk; he comes back with five rendered plans, beautifully thought out." She trusted him. "That was the key to the whole thing," she says.

Still, she had a hard time deciding which plan to go with. Time passed. The dilemma of remodeling or starting from scratch remained unresolved. Various boyfriends' input only muddied the waters. Then events, as events will do, overtook her waffling.

A year and a half ago, the cleaning lady came to her, apologizing for something in the bathroom. Baffled, Niederer took a look and discovered the shower walls had rotted out and a large hole had appeared in one of the tiled walls when the maid tried to clean them. The hole was deep enough to expose the wall studs. Indecision was over. She now had to commit.

"I work that way," she explains. "It's a little frightening, but it always leads me to the best decisions in my life. That night I emailed Cass a message: ‘Let's do it!' "

He came back with, "It's about time."

They decided to tear down the old house. A new one would rise a few yards north of the old one to optimize the landscaping. A target budget of under $200 a square foot was established. (New construction in Sonoma normally ranges from $300 to $400 a square foot.) Smith accepted the limitations.

Niederer's tiny budget didn't discourage Smith. "I work on projects with very high budgets and some in the middle, so this was kind of refreshing," he says. After all, he points out, he designed LuLu, the admired wood-burning bistro South of Market, on a shoestring. "I made the most of it, and it's still holding up," he says modestly.

"I wanted to prove that you could create a good custom house based on simplicity and restraint and with a reasonable budget," he says. "Many designers do some of their best work  when they have the tightest budgets to work with."

Working with the modest parameters, Smith sketched an oblong box with recessed porches on both ends. The cost-saving measures would bear out in the details. For the walls, he chose prefabricated, insulated panels that integrate seamlessly into the design. Next came elements appropriate to the house's streamlined ethos: bamboo floors, standard finishes, painted fiberboard cabinets, and gas fireplaces. These lower-priced items helped the budget hew to the bottom line.

Most noteworthy in an era of obese 7,000-square-foot McMansions, Niederer's house is deliberately small—no more than 2,000 square feet. Says Smith, "The house is no larger than it needs to be."

The rooms are infused with airiness and light from aluminum sliding glass doors, which are taller than most. Except for a vertical strip window in the hallway and three small skylights, the sliding glass doors are the only "windows" in the entire house. They're big enough to bring the outdoors into the interior.

The project's capper: a floating silver canopy of galvanized metal sheltering the eastern wing that mimics the pitched-roof forms of Sonoma's farm buildings. It's both functional and conceptual, permitting a dialogue between the sunlight and the cooling shade.

"The idea came to me when I saw a perfect stack of hay bales lined up under a wall-less metal shed," Smith says. "This is a little experimental, but more common if you look back in time than you may think."

After her house was completed, Niederer's sense of her property, of her family's home, has fundamentally changed. "In the old house, you didn't have an outside experience; you didn't know where you were. I might as well have been living in a tract home somewhere."

It's the happiest of collaborations: the client's needs dovetailing with the architect's goals. They've tracked together like the clean lines of the house itself.

"I really like the strength of the connection to the site," Niederer says. "When you are inside my house, it feels sewn to the land."

RESOURCES
Architect: Cass Calder Smith, 44 McLea Court, S.F., (415) 864-2800.
Landscape: Sonoma Mission Gardens Landscaping, 851 Craig Ave., Sonoma, (707) 938-5743