House & Garden (August 2003) "Helping Hands" by Beth Dunlop The ambassador has just arrived at the Palm Beach airport for a quick visit to check on the progress of his home renovations. "Let's go by and see the house," he said to the friend who met him. The friend began to mumble. "I don't think you want to do that," he said. "Don't be silly," replied Edward Elson, at the time the U.S. ambassador to Denmark. "We went by, and there wasn't a house," Elson says. Months earlier, he and his wife Susie, had bought a fairly nondescript early-1990's house and turned to their New York architect son, Harry, to redo it. After long, fruitful hours of discussion and design - even a bit of debate - the couple returned to Copenhagen. They thought they knew what Harry was doing, but they didn't. "Of course, at the end of the day, he was absolutely right," Susie says. The son had studied his parents well. "This was a very pedestrian, neo-Regency builder house," Harry says. "I just stripped it down to its essence, to its bones." What he built in its place is modern yet classically proportioned, simple yet highly sophisticated . It is house with a certain ease and lofty ambitions, a house for uncomplicated living and formal entertaining. Edward Elson, former rector of the University of Virginia, and his wife, a former chairwomen of the American Craft Council who has been collecting for decades, developed a love for artist-made furniture, fine and unusual antiques, and New Realist paintings. During their six-year stint in Europe, they were captivated by the simplicity of style in Denmark and became fascinated by the Palladian villas of northern Italy. Thus the mandate to their son: make a house that is both minimalist and epic. "It is not large," the architect says, "but it is somehow almost endless in scale." The central space is a capacious, high-ceilinged living room with the proportions of an art gallery, which it essentially is, accommodating outsized paintings by Jack Beal and James Valerio, among others, as well as ceramics, drawings, and a remarkable mosaic wing chair - it sits in one corner as if it were furniture - by Candace Bahouth. A library features a metal chair by Andre Dubreuil and a bronze and silver-plate sculpture/table by Lucas Samaras opens off to one side. Oversized French doors lead to a broad, covered loggia. "What's nice is that it all flows together, and yet there are intimate spaces," Susie Elson says. "When just the two of us are here, it's not too big, but we can have ten for dinner or entertain one hundred and fifty." New York designer Alan Tanksley came to "curate" the collections, a term used well in this case. He commissioned furniture - two curved, pale living room sofas that flank a Wendell Castle coffee table, for example - that would, he say, "play a supporting role, framing and giving life to the room and allow the very important, complex, and visually assertive pieces a presence." For the dining room, Tanksley commissioned from Donald Lipski a chandelier ("Well, it really transcends chandelier," Tanksley says) that is an inverted tree. The dining room is a skylit cube filled with art and handcrafted furniture, but the tree dominates. By day, it is a work of art, but, Tanksley says, "at night it is an apparition, like something from Hawthorne, dazzling and ethereal." Harry Elson, who worked for Edward Larrabee Barnes and Charles Gwathmey before setting out on his own, is a well-schooled modernist, but does not limit his scope or his sources. "I appreciate metaphor," he says, "but as a starting point, not as replication." He drew ideas from Palladio, Alvar Aalto, Erik Gunner Asplund, Paul Rudolph, even the New Orleans's French Quarter. "I wanted a modern villa," he says. "The building is not just the object but part of the landscape." The Charlottesville, Virginia landscape architect Warren Byrd designed a garden that is divided into three distinct rooms: a narrow, junglelike walkway that culminates in Robert Arneson's Big Head of Jackson Pollock, the open pool area, and a lawn with a single sculpture, by Anthony Gormley. The garden is planted entirely in green and white flowering plants, which make it "so serene and cool," Byrd says. For all that this house contains, it is tranquil. "Of all the houses we've had, the places we've lived," Edward Elson says, "this is the one I enjoy the most. I take extra delight in just waking up in the morning in the peaceful and elegant environment.