But most of all, says King, the Sarasota School houses teach us about "beauty, clarity and intention." In those elegant, streamlined structures, where nothing is extraneous or arbitrary, design seems distilled to its essential elements. "In a house that's all glass with a flat roof," King explains, "there's very little to hide behind. If the design is clear and well-thought-out, that comes through." He and his wife have discovered that's the challenge-and the reward-of living in their Paul Rudolph house. "Everything has to matter-it has to be beautiful or useful or meaningful," he says. That keeps them busy carting stuff off to consignment stores. "But it also makes us look at things."

Beauty, clarity and intention-any house can embody those principles, whether it's a modernist box on the beach or a magnificent French chateau. Sarasota designer Wilson Stiles recently spent a week on a grand old summer estate in the Berkshires. The house had 12 servants' bedrooms, three different living rooms and an indoor squash court and was filled with antiques and art. Yet it was completely comfortable and welcoming, Stiles says; everything about it expressed the idea of a summer family retreat, where generations of children have romped through the rooms and adults have lingered over lively dinners long into the night.

Maybe what jars us about so many of the new trophy homes isn't really their size-it's their confusion. When they're wildly out of scale with their surroundings, or built in a mish-mash of architectural styles or seemingly designed to impress passers-by rather than to nurture the occupants inside, they come off as fake, even pathetic, rather than impressive. A house, like a human being, needs a sure sense of itself and its place in the world to be great. The Sarasota School architects understood that, and that's why the houses they built here are worth studying-and celebrating.