Pagoda Perfection

The pagoda house invites you to remove your shoes. You do, and you are glad. The floor is heated.

On a February day, snow flocks pine, spruce and every inch of lawn and wind whistles around the corners. Inside, lighting creates a sense of warmth and sunlight and geothermal heat does the rest.

The home is welcoming and warm — just as Jerry Ross envisioned. On a high point in the Ponca Hills, the pagoda house could be an energy guzzler. Instead, it is a miser.

The cost of heating this 6,800-square-foot home runs about $300 a month in winter. From the beginning, its design incorporated geothermal heating, triple-pane windows, almost 10-inch-thick walls, radiant floor heat and passive solar heat from large windows on the south side of the house.

Jerry Ross was thinking green thoughts in 1996 — for cost effectiveness and energy efficiency — before it was widely popular, especially in home construction. Why?

“You can't build a house of this size and not consider those issues.”

Now, after 14 years, the house is finished — down to the smallest detail.

Jerry Ross thought of all kinds of details, said his son, Jay.

“My father is a perfectionist,” he said.

“He's a do-it-all-out, all-the-way kind of guy. He is noncompromising. He has a hard vision. And he will work his absolute darnedest until he achieves that vision.”

The senior Ross isn't Asian; he's German, the third generation of a family of grocers in south Omaha.

Inspired by the simplicity and, at the same time, ornateness of Chinese design, he followed his passion and brought his training as a mechanical engineer to the project.

He started in 1996, and by 2001, he had the exterior looking Asian enough that folks driving by were expecting to see a restaurant sign. It had the look of the Imperial Palace, a restaurant in west Omaha.

Inside, Ross couldn't have boiled water. The finish work stalled because Ross ran out of funds. His health was declining, too. And yet, as he said then, he was determined to finish.

After renegotiating his bank loan and securing the kind of craftsmen who could meet Ross' exacting specifications, the work resumed.

Son Jay moved back to Omaha from Chicago in 2006 to oversee the work after his father was hospitalized for a time after back surgery.

The work of skilled artisans and the eye of a perfectionist can be seen in dozens of exquisite details.

Wood, in every nook and cabinet, is bamboo. This renewable material is a grass that can be compared in its hardness to maple wood.

Details in the kitchen hint to the emphasis on detail throughout the home:

• Kitchen cabinet doors are finished in two shades of bamboo, a steamed, dark gray and a natural lighter shade. Interior light of the cabinets creates silhouettes of glassware and other objects behind rice-papered glass panels.

• Marble countertops are a “Luna Pearl” color and pattern, a gray-brown with black fleck. A finishing band around the top is white Thassos marble. The kitchen table is custom made of that same white Thassos marble.

• Red-stained bamboo is used lavishly opposite the work center.

• The center island has gas and electric cooktops and a prep area with a reverse osmosis water source for steamed vegetables and salad-making.

• A pantry behind the kitchen wall is a workhorse of ingenuity and accessibility. Shallow shelving puts all supplies in view and in easy reach. The pantry also has narrow but functional counter surfaces, dual sinks and multiple connections for small appliances.

Stairs have been meticulously worked into the fabric of the house by using intricate joinery built by a craftsman. A newel post displays the inlay effect of various stained bits of bamboo. That same attention to detail is in a French knot pattern of bamboo worked into the corners of the dining room floor.

Elements repeat throughout the house for a unifying effect.

“You see it in Chinese palaces,” Jay Ross said of the motif that symbolizes long life at the entry to the house and is repeated in sections of the banister that encircles a massive white marble chimney.

That chimney starts in the basement, a finished lower level, with a fireplace that opens onto a hearth room. The chimney rises to the roof line in a room of sunlight, white marble and polished bamboo.

A grand piano was to go here, Ross said, but movers damaged the floor when putting the instrument in place. The floor was redone.

That's the kind of slow, two steps forward, one step back, progress this 14-year adventure has become.

Jerry Ross has lived in the house through most of the construction. Jay Ross, since his return from Chicago, has set up an office and bedroom, too.

Now that it is finished, the house is simply more than either father or son can handle.

It and its five acres of ground continue to be for sale, now nearing a year, at $1.6 million.

Contact the writer:

444-1059, rhonda.stansberry@owh.com

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