Looking from the living room, your eye takes in the dining room and lands on the short terra cotta-colored wall. The kitchen sits right behind. (See my slideshow at the end of this post for a more real-life tour.)

Who lives in this Palatine home with the gently sloping pagoda rooflines?

Knock, knock . . .
Who’s there? Min Pak and her son, Andrew

The back story: Min, an artist and, until recently, photo imager for the Chicago Tribune, bought this five-bedroom home 3½ years ago. She’s its third owner; the first was the home’s architect Dennis Stevens, who built it and two similar Palatine residences in 1968. “I don’t like a boxy house. I like it very open,” Min says.

“When I was at Ragdale [the artists’ retreat in Lake Forest], my studio was like this. It was a huge one-room studio with a huge skylight and high ceilings. It was a very open space.”

And this house, with its soft loft-like design (walls fall far short of the ceilings that peak at a soaring 25 feet) is that too.

With the soft-loft walls, each room opens overhead to the next. And though there is not one traditional window (really), light and nature come streaming into the home through huge skylights in the two pagoda-like domes, another arched skylight over the front hallway and eating/area and clerestories and walls of sliding glass doors in the master bedroom and living room help the cause.

With the low walls, Min can lie in bed at night and see the moon or lightning, snowfall or rainfall through the sliding doors that line one wall and through the pagoda’s skylight in the nearby “waterfall gallery” (check out the stunning lava-rock waterfall in the slideshow that follows).

So what else is inside? Lots of light (“When you paint, you need the sunlight,” Min says).

Really bringing the outdoors in.

A 41-year-old ficus tree that grows out of the ground in the front hall. Furniture that is a graceful mix of traditional and contemporary.

Vignettes, tablescapes, color choices and beautiful surprises that point to the artist’s eye. Two blood red vases in the shape of Asian robes that point to her love of the hunt (they were Hobby Lobby finds; you can see them in the slideshow). And a glittery but not too-glittery kitchen chandelier (you can see this, too, in the slideshow) that points to Min’s need for “something elegant, something glamorous.”

Enough with the words, eh? On to the slideshow . . .

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