The Hauptman House occupied a hillside location three acres in size. The course of its design and construction took eight years, four for design, four for construction. Pawson, known for his exacting minimalism, specified that no hinge, light switch or baseboard be visible within the house. Lines had to be flush and true. To accommodate this precision, interior workmanship had to be done and redone, costing huge amounts of money. Fortunately, the Hauptmans had sufficient resources to fund frequent revision, as he was a movie producer and she an heiress to the Bronfman liquor fortune. Her aunt, Phyllis Lambert, convinced her father to commission Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York, NY. As evidenced by the Hauptman House, Pawson shared Mies's obsession with clarity of form and minimal presentation. The Hauptman House and Seagram Building also shared the illusion of machine-made simplicity created by painstaking hand labor. Pawson worked with interior designers Alexandra and Michael Misczynski as well as the landscape architect, Jonathan Bell.

The Hauptman House was the third design by the Englishman Pawson in the US; the others were the Calvin Klein, Incorporated, Madison Avenue Store (1995) in New York, NY, and a private residence in the posh mountain resort of Telluride, CO (2001). The architect hoped to scale the house appropriately to its surroundings, but to provide the necessary 20,000 square feet, he chose to submerge its first story into its hillside site. The two stories above grade read as if a pristine, rectangular box were balanced on a glass and brick stand.

PCAD id: 16787