Conrad Buff III and Donald Hensman spent their careers proving that a modern house could be a spiritual thing — that strong, simple lines and honest, native materials could hold a life as well as any cathedral. By the late 1970s, they were among the architects who had defined Southern California modernism — the Gamble House's Randell Makinson called them the modern-day Greene and Greene. Carol found them in the Los Angeles Times, in a feature on Hensman's own Mulholland Drive home, Domus Solaris. "We liked the design," she said, "and we liked the materials."

Carol and Richard King brought them a different kind of brief. Theirs was a life of international humanism — a life spent looking outward, to Japan, whose traditional homes taught them simplicity, privacy, and spatial harmony, and to the adobe Southwest, with its earthbound warmth. They wanted a house that held all of it: Japanese restraint, Southwestern soul, and modernist clarity, gathered into a single roof.

Where those visions met, Arroyo del Rey took shape — a cruciform house that lies low and entirely horizontal, its redwood and native materials dissolving the line between built and grown. Rough stucco and river rock drawn from the arroyo, etched-glass doors by artist Judy Jensen, and every piece of furniture built by the architects for this house alone. It was, as the Kings put it, "a room in the forest in the city." Hensman called it "more sculpture than structure."