BOLDLY GO …

The Lake Highlands Women’s League home tour showcases stellar dwellings and changes lives

Hughes

The Lake Highlands Women’s League Home Tour, embarking on year 36, garners a significant sum of dough each year to fund life-changing college scholarships for Lake Highlands High School seniors. The foundation also distributes funds to a dozen other organizations — schools, library programs, the YMCA and credit counseling nonprofits, to name a few. The cause notwithstanding, the event in and of itself fosters neighborhood sociability, inspires innovation, breeds pride in Lake Highlands properties and forces participants to cross all those little home improvement chores off the to-do list, notes homeowner Diane Cheatham, whose home is on the tour.

And the specialness of Cheatham’s home — a modern Star Trek-inspired architectural masterpiece — cannot be adequately stressed.

It should be noted that Cheatham owns the ultra-contemporary neighborhood in which her home is situated. Several years back, she purchased 14 acres of brushy land just east of Central Expressway and south of Forest and built there a village of sustainable homes varying in shape and square footage — their values range from $300,000 to several million dollars. Representing the upper end of that scale is her three-story, 4,336-square-foot home, built, as is every aspect of the Urban Reserve community, with an impeccable respect for Mother Earth, originality and whimsy.

Cheatham hired a pair of nationally acclaimed architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien out of New York City, to build her Urban Reserve home (other homes there are built by various well-respected modern architects).

“They don’t build many houses, so I had to go there and talk them into it,” Cheatham says.

When describing her vision, she says, she mentioned her love of Star Trek and the aesthetics of the Starship Enterprise.

She says she wasn’t sure if they thought she was nuts (“They had a glazed look,” she notes, “and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve said the wrong thing’ ”), but they took the job. Turns out they were listening — visitors to One Vanguard Way initially are “beamed up,” as Cheatham calls it, by

Opposite/ Diane Cheatham’s modern home is nestled in Urban Reserve, a subdivision of Lake Highlands that she owns. Above/ Living room shades are drawn to dog level (so the pets can see outside, the owner explains) and pieces of fine art accent the space.