In 1987, the owner of this house—an avid art collector and owner of a drywall company—purchased 42 acres to grow citrus in an agricultural community north of Los Angeles. Postmodern architecture was all the rage at the time, so the owner hired Zoltan E. Pali to design a Georgianstyle residence. The young architect, who happened to be a disciple of the Case Study modernists, was just starting out on his own and couldn’t afford to decline the commission. “It’s sort of like young people when they are dating,” he says. “I was idealistic enough to think I could change him.”

With a six-month window for design, pre-wire, installation and programming, this was by far the quickest construction project DSI Entertainment Systems had ever been involved in.