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much of the remaining structure. The clients wanted tall ceilings — 18 or 20 feet in places — and an overall feeling of opulence, with polished marble and gleaming brass. Fontenot listened, then firmly steered them in a different direction. His answer to a house with soaring ceilings was to keep every element low and rooted in nature, and to choose humble, imperfect materials rather than flash — wabi-sabi, in practice. The Belgium trip had shown him exactly how that could be done. Fontenot gave them the ceiling heights they requested, along with custom 10-foot doors throughout, but the doorknobs are barely an inch and a quarter wide, a Rocky Mountain hardware style made in a smaller size specifically for this house. "When you reach for one, your hand feels enormous," he says. "It's a peculiar feeling — I was definitely playing with scale." The primary bath says everything about how Fontenot thinks. The clients had arrived with pictures of highly veined marble, polished and glamorous. Fontenot wanted something more understated and textural, something that felt as though it had been made by the earth rather than selected from a showroom. He lined the cabinets and the room in Mexican travertine wainscoting, which was milled from raw blocks and shipped to Houston. "I wanted to bring the eye down and keep it low," he says. "I didn't want to extend the eye anywhere upward." The travertine he chose is rougher and more irregular than its Italian counterpart, full of natural voids and crevices shaped by water seeping through the stone over millions of years. He left those tactile irregularities on all but the countertops. "I love anything rough-hewn, anything created by the earth over time," he says. Engineering the room took nearly a year — cabinet hinges had to be strong enough to bear the weight of stone drawer fronts, and every edge and seam had to align perfectly across a material that is, by nature, anything but uniform. If the primary bath is Fontenot at his most disciplined, the powder room is Fontenot at his most fearless. Every material in it is rare, ancient, and one of a kind. The clients are commercial builders by trade, accustomed to schedules and knowing exactly what was going where before the first nail was driven. Fontenot works differently — he lets a project find itself through the materials and objects he discovers along the way. He searched a long time for the right sink, until he walked into a Houston importer's yard and spotted a 16th-century travertine trough from Siena languishing in the dirt with plants growing from it. Time and From left: In the breakfast room, the late-19th-century Swedish pine table was sourced from Round Top. Pierre Chapo chairs, French, 1950s, with original leather. Mathieu Matégot stools. The kitchen's island and countertops are Belgian bluestone. Reclaimed French concrete tile on wall from Chateau Domingue; Waterworks faucet. Late-19th-century Bleached white oak floors. Limewash and mineral paint from Axel Vervoordt collection, through Chateau Domingue.