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121 the two-bedroom jewel-box wasn't built for his family of four. When it still hadn't sold months later, See insisted Martin visit in person. "If I couldn't have the house, I wanted someone I knew to have it," he says. After the tour, over dinner, Martin was uncharacteristically silent. "I've never heard him so quiet," See says. When he finally did speak, it was a rousing endorsement: "You're right. This is the coolest house in Dallas." T o understand the evolution of the Oak Lawn property, we must look back to the '70s through '90s. What makes this house so extraordinary, for starters, is the remarkable lighting. Craig Roberts cut 23 skylights into its modest frame, adding an artful, complex overlay of illumination that turns the simple cottage into a dramatic play of light. It was a pioneering move in a city that, during the 1980s, thought "lighting design" meant pointing floods at live oaks in the yard. Roberts choreographed natural and artificial light like a Broadway production, casting mood and drama to interior spaces in a way that Dallas had never seen. After attending Parsons, Roberts moved to Dallas in 1976 to be near his brother. Clients were scarce at first. To assist, Parsons mailed letters of recommendation to local designers and architects on his behalf. Acclaimed Fort Worth designer Tonny Foy was the only one to respond, but his oil-rich, design-savvy clientele embraced Roberts immediately. "He took me first to Anne and Sid Bass' house and then to Richard and Marsha Moncrief's house, and those were my first projects," Roberts says. Over the next 40 years, Anne Bass enlisted Roberts to create lighting for all her houses, including her Connecticut farmhouse and New York apartment, and to add "lighting and drama" to her Paul Rudolph-designed Westover Hills house. Bass opened doors, and Roberts was soon lighting projects for design greats Mark Hampton and Peter Marino. Foy added his own touches to Roberts' cottage — severe modernist gestures such as black industrial carpet, chalk-white walls, and Mies van der Rohe furniture. It was a cool, minimal prelude to the interiors Foy orchestrated a few years later for Routh Street Café, the groundbreaking restaurant whose cutting-edge design and cuisine put A glass-topped sunroom is the ideal spot for Chas Martin's blowout feasts. Chas Martin in the back courtyard. The Neoclassical architecture features solid limestone columns and Palladio- inspired windows and doors. Left: A pergola in paradise, with original custom wrought-iron furniture, antique terracotta planters, and lionhead waterspouts lining the pool.