San Francisco architect Jim Jennings began his studies as an engineer—not a big surprise considering that his modernist architecture, which includes the award-winning Visiting Artists House in Sonoma County, demonstrates a through-line of formal elegance and rigorous clarity.

Moreover, an engineering feat—a prefabricated structural system that “liberated the floor plan,” Jennings says, by eliminating the need for shear walls—enabled the form of his latest project, in northern California. The single-story, 6,900-square-foot house, a quiet triumph of right angles and rectilinear motifs, rests as a solid, serene presence on a ridge within a nature-filled private development.