New to Norway

Busy working on a pharmaceutical office in a southern port city across the sea from Taiwan, design director Xu Fu-Min received a phone call about a very different kind of project nearby.

The client asked Xu to visit the site of his future family home—a weedy hillside that, on first glance, seemed less than enticing. But what intrigued Xu was an enormous boulder, 10 feet across, sitting smack in the middle of the 1-acre property. “I insisted we keep it,” he says. Around it, he proceeded to design a 4,200-square-foot house.