When Peter Blandori went looking for a home in upstate New York in 2003, he had a simple set of criteria: three bedrooms, open western views of fields, and a basement. He was thinking farmhouse, but after viewing 50 homes in the area ("my realtor says 75"), he finally found what he was looking for in the rolling hills above the village of Chatham—and a farmhouse it was not. "All my criteria went out the window," he says.

What he bought was a sleek, modern home with two bedrooms and no basement built by the Boston and Phoenix-based design team of JASONOAH Ltd. (www.jasonoah.com). Students of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture, the two partners, Jason Silverman and Noah Grunberg, built the house on spec with the idea of creating a structure that expressed the basic elements of architecture—site, light, walls, materials. The house is stripped down to the essentials—concrete floors, plaster walls with a wax finish, pine framing. There's nothing added, no frills, just a bold statement of design and geometry.

And if, as Le Corbusier quipped, a house is a machine for living, then Blandori's home is a perfect fit. A graphic designer and photographer, Blandori shares the architects' aesthetics, as evidenced by the sleek furniture and furnishings with which he's filled the house. "With the light and all these angles—no corner is 90 degrees, nothing's squared off—you're always getting different patterns throughout the year," says Blandori, standing in the great room, which points like a blunted arrow southwest at the distant Catskills. "But no one's ever said they felt uncomfortable here. And I've never had trouble putting things in it."

"I feel lucky," he continues. "Friends say, 'This is your house.' Yet I was never looking for a house like this."

High on Design The house is a study in simple materials, angles, and natural light, helped by the new sliding doors just installed in the great room.

Grunberg describes a "leap of faith" as part of the process of designing a space, that sometimes you have to wait to see the space built to find out how the geometries play out. He admits that his favorite part of the building process is just after the house has been framed: "The question we ask ourselves is, How little drywall can we use?"

"We want people to see the materials," Silverman adds.

"We wanted to create a space you experience," says Grunberg. To that end, Silverman explains, they wanted the house to present the idea of a procession, a sense of discovery. He imagined entering the home and being presented with views to the front and back, then wending toward the open space of the living room, which opens up into a display of light—first through the trapezoid window, which Silverman likens to a Japanese screen, and then along the wall of rectangular windows and doors facing south. A soaring space opens above the entryway, which recedes into the rear of the home, all acute angles and lines. There's even a cut-out above the kitchen. "Compression and expansion" is how he explains it: "If your dog and cat can chase each other around and around in a house, then it works."