RAMSEUR, N.C.


THE little house was awfully pretty, its corrugated metal cladding glinting in the sunlight, as honest and spare as a child’s drawing, amid ancient magnolias and overlooking acres of lush soybeans. The owners, Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, two psychology professors at Duke, declared themselves delighted with it.


They admired the way the house embodied the rural architecture they loved: the dogtrot cabins of the American South and the “wrinkly tin” structures of New Zealand, where they are conducting a longitudinal study of 1,000 individuals. (Dr. Moffitt, 57, and Dr. Caspi, 52, are nature- and nurture-ists. Their work examines the role of environment and genes in human behavior, particularly antisocial behavior and depression.) Dr. Caspi recalled the shacks on the kibbutz he grew up on, and Dr. Moffitt pointed out how the house’s tiny footprint overlaid that of the original farmhouse built by her family here in the 1920s, and how potent the memories still are.


To be sure, the house does have its skeptics. There was the neighbor who exclaimed, “Honey, you’ve made a terrible mistake and built your fireplace outside of your living room.” (Dr. Moffitt told him, “It’s worse than that. There is no living room.”) And her father took a dim view of their building, as he put it: “a cross between a chicken house and a trailer.”


But the only review they really cared about was that of Stephen Atkinson, an architect with whom they had made an unusual bargain. Mr. Atkinson, who lives and works in Palo Alto, Calif., had given them the plans for the house — they were free, but with a caveat. For every change they made to his original design, he would charge them.


No chimney, for instance, would cost them $3,000. Clear glass instead of translucent fiberglass windows? That would run $4,000. A cathedral ceiling, rather than the flat modernist one he had specified? $2,500.


Put another way, the more closely the house hewed to his vision, the less it would cost them. Mr. Atkinson, for whom this house has become something of an obsession, was making sure that the third incarnation of the structure he called the Zachary House would be close to perfect.


IN the mid ’90s, when Mr. Atkinson, now 45, was a few years out of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he began to hawk the plan of a dogtrot-style, two-room modernist dwelling clad in corrugated metal to various architecture journals. To his delight, it won a prestigious prize — a citation from Progressive Architecture — and he begged his father, a retired Baton Rouge dentist with property in Zachary, La., to build it.


When he did, for $45,000, the 550-square-foot house became a little star, appearing in 39 magazines, from those with a modernist bent, like Dwell, to more traditional ones, like Southern Living, as well as a number of books.


Zachary House hit a chord with all sorts of people, not just architecture buffs and designers, for whom the abstracted dogtrot had became a kind of fetish object, in the words of Karrie Jacobs, founding editor of Dwell magazine. (Modernist riffs on rural, regional architecture were bubbling up all over the place, from the Rural Studio in Alabama to Houston, where Brett Zamore, a local architect, was playing around with something he called the shot-trot, his own fusion of a dogtrot and shotgun-style house.)


Its cross shape, two small rooms connected by a breezeway bisected by a long deck, mimicked that of the great cathedrals. Cost-conscious environmentalists and those devoted to the tiny-house movement applauded its price and its size. And architecture writers worked themselves into a lather over it (“a poetic construct which contains an essence greater than its potential interpretations — a persistent formal structure whose perceived meaning will be less than the overall essence of the architecture,” one enthused academic wrote in a university journal).


Mr. Atkinson found himself spoiled by all the attention. “I’m really ambitious,” he said. “And this avalanche of personal attention was not a good lesson. The world just doesn’t work this way.”


For years, he received calls and e-mail from fans asking for the plans. And for years he refused, because he didn’t know how to price them and didn’t like the idea of his house being built without his supervision.