At the top of a wooded cliff overlooking the northern edge of Shelter Island, a box of glass and steel rises like a thought bubble. That's fitting for a structure that no one but Stuart Parr would have dreamed up. Ten years ago, the part-time film producer and full-time furniture dealer hadn't built so much as a doghouse, and here he had turned a scrap-paper sketch into a 3,600-square-foot, three-bedroom retreat he now shares with his five-year-old daughter, Harper.

With the help of an architect, Parr began to scale the steep learning curve of drawing up a dream house, and over a three-month period, he delivered fourteen pages of hand-drawn, mad-genius specifications to his contractor, Rick Shumway. "It was like building a house of cards," Parr says.

Read the article on Clearhouse and more features on architecture and design in the September/October 2006 issue of Men's Vogue.