home of distinction

This modern marvel combines functionality, beauty, warmth and creativity. You’ll never see another home like it, so transport yourself through this futuristic wonder.

By Carol Brock

The next person who rings Cindy Lindsay and Steve Sheafor’s doorbell may just hear The Jetsons theme song. The popular 1960s cartoon about a space-age family is an apropos greeting, considering the couple’s astonishingly contemporary home.

When it debuted 43 years ago, The Jetsons wooed audiences with the promise of saucer homes floating in the heavens and high-tech gadgets of every type. Steve and Cindy’s equally futuristic home may be terrestrial, but it does have remarkable features all its own, like slanted walls, space-age materials, and four mechanical rooms devoted to 800 amps that operate the lighting, audio, video, shades, thermostats, ventilation, air conditioning and security from touch pads in most rooms.

Just as The Jetsons astounded viewers at the time, Steve and Cindy’s place always gets the same reaction from first-time visitors: “Wow, what an amazing home!”

In fact, the couple’s 8,900-square-foot home may be the perfect marriage between contemporary design, artistic architecture, futuristic materials and state-of-the-art technology.

“We live here every day and we sometimes get to feeling a little blasé about the house,” Cindy says, “but everybody who comes here is like, ‘Wow!’ So it’s really nice for us to go, ‘Oh yeah, wow!’ and remember that we did put the time and energy into the house to get that kind of reaction.”

But to the old saying, “right place at the right time,” you would have to add “with the right people” in the case of this home, because it never would have been as magnificent without the right architect, builder, subcontractors and artisans, as well as the owners themselves.

Transplants from Silicon Valley, Cindy and Steve are engineers (he’s electrical, she’s software) who were in the right place at the right time. In the mid-’90s, their Longmont company, Sitera, designed a specialized computer chip for managing Internet traffic. In 2002, California-based Vitesse (a French term for “speed”) bought Sitera, and in a blink, the couple found themselves on the tail end of the computer boom with a lot of cash in their hands.

“At the time we sold Sitera, a lot of people made a lot of money and built houses here, because I guess that’s just what you do,” says Steve, who now operates a high-tech consulting company with Cindy called FLS Consulting. “And, we finally had the time to be heavily involved, which is the only way we would ever build a house.” But their only custom home wouldn’t be any old house, and Steve and Cindy aren’t any old homeowners. “We’re kind of crazy,” says Cindy with a laugh, “so it was really important to find people who could do crazy stuff.”

Enter architect Laurence “Renzo” Verbeck of Boulder’s Verbeck Design Studios Inc. Young, ambitious and gifted, Renzo welcomed the challenge, especially Steve and Cindy’s wish to create an indoor atrium with 900 square feet of plants, boulders and a waterfall that cascades two floors beneath a staircase connecting three of the home’s four levels. [Read about Renzo in Carol Brock's "Architect Abstract" in our "Meet the Community" section.]

“They were ceaselessly creative,” says Renzo, noting that Steve designed the twinkling lights recessed into sky-colored panels above the atrium, as well as the staircase tread lights. The couple also designed several computer and cardboard models of their home before it was built. “They’re very attached to nature,” Renzo says, “and they wanted the house to be very grounded in nature and the atrium to be a focal point.” Steve and Cindy also wanted an ultra-contemporary, clean design and were delighted to discover Renzo was also a contemporary sculptor and furniture designer who was knowledgeable about unusual materials.

The couple interviewed several architects before selecting Renzo, who worked for Eric Smith Associates at the time. “The other architects approached it like we would,” Steve says. “We’re both engineers, so we would have asked how many square feet do you want, how many rooms, etc. We wanted someone who could bring something new to the mix.”

When the couple initially interviewed Renzo, he asked different questions. “He said, ‘Tell us how you live, tell us what you do in your home,’” Cindy says. “So the house was designed from a function point of view.”

In this case, however, function had to follow form, as the couple’s Pinebrook Hills lot was long, narrow and steep, and subject to height restrictions. “The site sort of dictated the home’s long, thin shape,” Steve says, noting the home spans 194 feet end to end and was built south to north because of the difficult terrain.

But long and thin hardly meant straight and narrow. “I look through a sculptor’s eyes, so everything is a sculpture,” Renzo says. “I saw that house as a single space, and then sculpted out different areas so that each space had its own experience, yet it’s part of the whole experience. That was the overriding goal.”

That goal is clearly abundant in the curving, flowing shapes employed in the ceilings and surfaces, and the open floor plan that melds one room into the next, particularly the atrium, great room, kitchen and dining areas. “At one point you’re in all four spaces, yet you have a decision about which one to enter,” Renzo says. “The whole thing is about flow, so the house is full of nodes, or intersections, where your eye is drawn into many spaces at once and then you can go into different spaces from there. Each space is unique, but still part of the whole.”

The home’s contemporary nature is further revealed in windows that stretch to the floor and materials like resins that form the kitchen bar, floor-to-ceiling sconces, and panels that define and accent spaces. The home’s harder materials are softened and balanced by unusual, beautiful woods, including reclaimed Thai railroad ties in the main-level floor kitchen, various oak ceiling panels and bamboo kitchen cabinets; softly backlit onyx on either side of the main fireplace; glass tiles in a mantel and bar base; and a slate powder-room wall over which water trickles softly down.

Another feature that makes the home warm and inviting—rather than sterile contemporary—is family art. A painting of a snowcapped peak by Cindy’s mother awaits visitors in the foyer, along with other pieces she created for the home. Steve’s cousin, Michele, is a stained-glass artist who crafted the front door and a sliding door in the master bedroom that opens onto a balcony overlooking the waterfall. Her husband, Nathan, also a glass artist, created the home’s pendant lights.

Renzo designed the dining room table, master bedroom headboard and built-ins, and some of the home’s sculptures, including a 54-inch-tall marble female form. “Renzo is clearly from the Frank Lloyd Wright school, in that the furniture, the house and everything should all be designed together,” Steve says, “and we really like that.”

But the best-laid architectural plans depend upon a good builder, and Boulder’s Thomas Stanko Construction fit the bill. “Tom took us to several clients and they’d all greet him with a big hug and were so happy to see him that we knew he was probably a good builder,” Steve says. “Before we built our house we’d heard all these horror stories about builders getting a job 90-percent done, but not finished, because they were off to their next project. So it was nice to see that people were so happy to see Tom.”

In fact, Steve says, “he’s told us many times he’s our builder for life. If something ever goes wrong, he’ll fix it.”

Which is the perfect scenario for a couple that plan to live in their house forever. “We’re going to be buried right out there in the meadow,” Cindy laughingly says. “I mean, why would we ever want to leave this place?”

Carol Brock is editor of Boulder County Home & Garden Magazine and had a hard time leaving Steve and Cindy’s home after their interview because it’s so darn cozy and makes you feel completely at home.

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© 2006 Brock Publishing Company
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