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After spending most of your career designing for clients, what would you design for yourself? Jim Jennings, founder of an eponymous architecture firm, has done something very different than the other projects in Herman Miller's POV roundup: His personal and self-designed retreat is a windowless concrete structure, a compound rather than a house.

"The basic concept of this builidng is one of enclosure, it's all about the wall," Jennings explains in this video, elaborating on his concept of a retreat. "What I wanted to do is to define the different elements with the textures and the expression of the materials as pattern." Jennings' color-free take on the retreat is extreme to be sure, a self-challenging design on the highest order.

(Be sure to hit the link below the video, where you can click for a chance to win a copy of photographer Julius Shulman's Modernism Rediscovered book.)