Creativity Unplugged: Bachelor‘s DREAM HOME Celebrates Sensuality

Feb. 23, 2005

Do you remember a moment in your firebrand years when you dreamed of designing the ultimate sensual house? An open-air bedroom with fresh air kissing your skin, music that swelled into every corner, a spa that twinkled with stars?
Later, your dream house disappeared around the corner with your kids.
Happiness was re-dreamed... what you really needed was an automatic dishwasher and good closet space.
Ah, but Michael Belitsos never let go of that first, youthful dream, and his Up North get-away is designed with all the above. It just may get your juices flowing again. Call it Creativity Unplugged.
“This house is only for my greatest hits,” said Belitsos. “The books I love, the films I love, and the people I love... that goes without saying.”
When Belitsos first approached Suttons Bay architect David Hanawalt in 2000, Belitsos asked for a one-room house with a continuous space that flowed. Through design, it evolved into a 2,000 square-foot home on two floors with a steam spa, two baths, and a gorgeous tub that gives bathers a simultaneous view of the moon, the fireplace, and Lake Michigan. The custom bed on the upper floor actually rolls on tracks onto a screened deck for sleeping in the open air. And true to the original vision, the house flows unobstructed, lacking doors except to the bathrooms.

QUIET SOLUTION
The first problem the creative duo solved was how to shut out traffic noise. Belitsos lives on a busy road up the shoreline between Suttons Bay and Traverse City.
“We knew we had to shield the sound of cars, but on the waterfront side, we wanted to bring in the light of Lake Michigan,” Hanawalt explained.
His solution was to build a curved concrete wall facing the highway.
The concrete wall protects or “cradles” the wooden ark of the home facing the lake. At first blush, the house looms from the shoreline as a friendly fortress with curved arches over the windows and door. A lot of fun to look at, but the wall effect was difficult to achieve, like many details in the home.
“To pour the concrete surface smooth required curved steel forms lined with epoxy coated plywood. This provided an unusually smooth finish,” Hanawalt explained.
Visitors approaching the thick mahogany front door are treated to a magical view of Lake Michigan, but it’s a bit mind-bending, as the lake is actually in the backyard. Hanawalt achieved this by designing a shotgun view through the house. Once inside, sunshine gushes through gigantic windows that showcase the lake. The upper transom windows open with the touch of a button.

ALWAYS CHANGING
“It’s like living in a terrarium -- a glass box in the middle of the most beautiful art conceivable. Natural and always changing,” Belitsos said, standing in the middle of the airy library.
The drama owes partly to the fact that the picture windows are seamless. Manufactured in mahogany by Eurotec, the largest, at 8 x 14 feet, cost $8,000 and required a crane for installation. Expensive, no doubt, but Belitsos said it was offset by money otherwise spent on art, exterior walls, insulation, and siding.
Is heat a problem with windows lining two major walls?
“No, for a couple of reasons,” Hanawalt explained. “The house faces southeast so that it heats up in the morning. Radiant floors heat up the home, and the thermal mass from the exterior concrete helps retain heat in winter, as well as maintain cooling in the house through summer.”

CREATIVE GUY
Belitsos has been a creative director in advertising for more than 20 years, presiding over award-wining campaigns for Jeep, Lincoln Mercury, Ford, Chrysler and Mazda. Now a creative director with W.B. Doner, he oversees the “zoom, zoom” Mazda ad. He loves magic and music, and owns up to performing with the band Fish Sticks. He carries his flute along with him to the various cities, where he lives and works -- San Francisco, Newport Beach, and Birmingham.
“I wanted to create the ultimate space to share the films I love and the music I enjoy,” Belitsos said.
Relentless creativity drove the project, Hanawalt said.
“Every single detail had to be considered. You have a creative client and a creative architect pushing each other to be more creative. It was a blast!”
Before beginning the design, the two gave each major space (an alternative) name so they would think about the spaces with a different mindset: the library, the spa, and the observatory.

THE LIBRARY
The heart of the home is the eclectic library and it’s the first room you see. Its 1,000 DVDs and 800 CDs are discreetly housed in Italian cabinetry made by Woodbine of Suttons Bay. There’s also a built-in, large flat-screen TV, and a Bang & Olafsen (the music system is wired throughout the house--even in the steam spa).
The kitchen flows from the library and includes an area for dancing.
Design themes are repeated throughout both rooms. The polished black granite countertops in the kitchen area match the face of the fireplace.
Beams in the floor mirror the beams in the ceiling. The proportions of the kiln dried Douglas fir timber frame space are geometrically based on the golden mean, phi, a universal mathematical proportion.
The kitchen, lined with smooth Varenna cabinetry, is designed to look like an extension of the library. The refrigerator and freezer, for example, are large pull-out drawers by SubZero (and, no surprise, filled with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and chilled wine).
“When the kitchen is part of (a) main living space, it can’t look like a kitchen. It has to look very clean,” Hanawalt said.
The kitchen is like a magic box, allowing you to discover its charms as you push and pull on doors and knobs.
“You expect to find just a drawer,” Hanawalt demonstrated, pulling out a drawer in the island. “But wait! There’s more!” And from the larger drawer appeared a smaller, custom-made silverware drawer.

THE SPA
For the love of (illusion), Hanawalt built a staircase to get to the spa -- you walk five steps up and seven steps down to get into the bathroom area. “It gives you a sense you’re going deep into the Earth,” he explained.
The most romantic room of the house, the spa area is dominated by an elegant, stainless steel tub you can almost swim in. Bathers are treated to a light show. Moonlight streams through a small window on one side. On the other side, a fireplace flickers. Through the flames is a view of Lake Michigan (a bulls-eye view through the picture windows in the library). The risers in the stairway are made of glass and glow with the dancing firelight.
“When we created one thing that was special, everything that evolved had to meet that standard,” Belitsos said. “Once everything becomes custom, nothing becomes customary.
“I had never built a house, so I decided before I left the planet, I would build a house that reflected my love of my passion for art and music,” he adds.
“Just go, don’t cut corners, just go. It sounds like fun, but there was a lot of attendant stress. These stairs had to be done over and over. The glass risers were complicated because they had to be reinforced with steel.”
A few steps from the tub is a steam spa tiled in translucent glass mosaic. Hidden in the ceiling are hundreds of fiber optics, which appear as shimmering stars pulsating through the steam. The Italian sink is a curved “Agape.” It means love... of course.

STAIRWAY
The stairs curve up to the observatory. This lends a sense of excitement about what’s around the corner, Hanawalt said. In fact, there’s a whole lot of excitement in the cypress stairwell—a collection of hand-carved, wooden figurines from the 1920s called “whistlers” that actually whistle. They’re exhibited in special cut-ins. “And that’s not all!” The stairway is lit with five unusual skylights called “deck prisms” that are customarily designed for sailboats.
“Those skylights came out of anger. I was on a plane and asked myself why is it that boats and airplanes can have smooth skylights, but in homes, the skylights have to look like a box Santa left on the roof?” Hanawalt said. “The deck prism is small and flush to the roof and it brings in a nice amount of light. It also has the added benefit of projecting rainbows. You see someone standing there and a spectrum of light washes over them. It’s amazing. I have learned more about light from this house. It’s a complex device of effects in light.”
The stairwell also has a concealed door that seamlessly blends into the wall. It opens up to a utility room. Belitsos said he saw a secret door in a home in Egypt and wanted it in his own someday.
“When you have a repairman come in, you have to say, find the fiddler on the wall and push,” he said, smiling.

OBSERVATORY
The upper level is called the “observatory” for the view of Lake Michigan, the sky and the stars. Custom glass guardrails were designed so as not to block the views. All the details were designed for clarity of line, such as the flush zinc baseboard throughout or the etched glass and aluminum sliding doors made by the Italian company, Tre-Piu. The bathroom again feels other-worldly -- tiled floor to ceiling in warm glass mosaics.
Yet the real centerpiece of the observatory is the bedroom. The ceiling is curved cypress, like a cupped hand embracing the bed below. And the bed (with zebra wood for its headboard) is, yes, on tracks. Belitsos gave it a gentle push and it rolled onto the screened-in deck, which overlooks Lake Michigan.
“You can hear the water and feel the breeze,” he said. “It’s particularly wonderful during storms.”
Belitsos said he was inspired by a picture he saw in a magazine of a bed out on the porch of a hunter’s cabin. Hanawalt suggested that the bed indoors and the bed outdoors could be one and the same with the help of lift-bearings and a track.
“The furniture making and the mechanism had to be blended and invented,” he said.

REINTERPRETING MODERNISM
Hanawalt describes his design approach with this home as sensual modernism.
“Modernism, originally, was in stark contrast to traditional architecture, but it felt too hard. We found we could interpret these modern materials in a more sensual way,” he said.
Jack Lane, a Real Estate One agent who regularly shows off his dance moves in the “library,” said the design is a fitting tribute to life’s passions.
“In the best of designs, a house becomes a poem or a story – a telling of one’s philosophies and travels – whether through architecture or artwork or decor or materials. Michael’s house is a fabulous tale of architectural history and a modern soul that keeps reaching.”