Eight years ago when the Manhattan gallery owner Greg Wooten bought a plot of land in the wilder reaches of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, he had in mind a simple, box-like structure that would sit lightly in its rural surroundings and provide a stylish yet neutral backdrop for his collection of mid-century-modern furniture. Many more years and much more money than envisaged down the line, he has ended up with a complex building that, while fulfilling all the original criteria, is also an experimental piece of architecture. With its curtain glass wall and trio of tall white towers, it seems to hover just above the hillside like a cross between a 1950s spaceship and a state-of-the-art submarine. 'If I’d known how all-consuming the process would be, I probably wouldn’t have gone ahead,’ admits Wooten, who commissioned the same architect, William Massie, to design his Tribeca gallery, Mondo Cane. 'But now it is finally finished I am delighted and wouldn’t want to change a thing.’

What Wooten and Massie had in common was a passion for the Case Study houses, built in Los Angeles between 1948 and 1964 and designed to bring modernism to the masses. For all their innovative use of materials such as glass, concrete, plywood and steel, these houses often had a close relationship with their natural surroundings. And it was the desire to bring the outside in that inspired a key feature of Wooten’s house: the wall of windows that wraps itself right round the building and floods the open-plan interior with light. Its construction – the panes of glass held between beams formed from strips of amber acrylic and plywood edged in steel – has, says Wooten, 'never been done before and will probably never be attempted again!’