Friends started to rave about their purchase. Architects and professors began knocking on their door, requesting tours. “That’s when we realized that what we’d gotten was an American masterpiece,” Myers says. The structure, known as the Douglas House, was conceived in the late 1960s when Jim and Jean Douglas of Grand Rapids reached out to Meier after seeing his 1967 Smith House on a magazine cover. “I wanted a Bauhaus sort of a house, very open,” Jim Douglas recalls. “We didn’t put any parameters on him because architects do their best work when they do it the way they want.”
The house was originally planned for a different site located in a development. But when they discussed exterior paint with a homeowners’ association, white was rejected as a color. That didn’t sit well with Meier, or with the Douglases. “[The homeowners’ association] wanted it to be beige,” Douglas recalls. “I got angry.” Client and architect decided against the site. Then the Douglases found a waterfront lot with three sides facing Lake Michigan. “It was very private and completely covered in trees—from the road you could see the lake. No one else could figure out how to build there,” Richard Meier recalls. “It took me quite a while to do it.”