Light from the 18 feet of windows stops joggers in their tracks. Key Highway drivers slam on their brakes to admire the multiple balconies. Neighbors in 19th-century red-brick rowhouses grumble about the white, five-level, 10-room modern structure they call "Malibu Beach House."

"Wow. It's stunning," says Gregory Smith, an Essex Community College art student, as he walked by. "You can tell that whoever designed it put a lot of himself into the work."

The newest landmark in one of the city's oldest sections is a private home designed and occupied by architect Paul Marks. He says he wasn't aiming for ostentation, but after years of drawing lines to please his clients, he decided to use this piece of Federal Hill to please himself.

Marks, 60, acknowledges that the building at 460 Grindall St. is something of a showcase, a demonstration of what is possible even under Baltimore building codes that favor traditional rowhouses. Marks built his dream house within those rules, without having to seek a community association's approval, without obtaining a zoning variance.

"Being an architect, I wanted to do my own thing," he says. "Architecture has become a commodity in our society. That's too bad. People don't design things for love."

Stepping onto a broad balcony that faces south and east to capture the winter sun, Marks tugs at a corduroy sports jacket. "This house is kind of going against the grain," he says, "but I'm happy with it."

For all the grumbling that Marks' creation clashes with the red brick to the west, it has quickly taken its place in the kaleidoscope of Key Highway, down the hill to the east. Some longtime residents complain that this waterfront road is fast becoming the city's playground, a space where Baltimore seems bigger and brasher, and nothing is out of place.

Already, the pink Harborview condo tower soars above the neon-red Domino Sugars sign, and the American Visionary Art Museum's moving whirligig sculpture looks down the street at the beige monolith of Southern High School. Plans for the area are even bolder: 20 new condominiums, a nursing home, a Ritz-Carlton hotel, perhaps a series of town homes at Harborview, built -- Venice-style -- around a canal. And a Crash Cafe, with a DC-3 running through the front wall.

"Neighborhoods will change," says Michela Gallagher, who teaches psychology at the Johns Hopkins University and lives in a white-yellow cottage behind Marks. She likes the new house. "This area is a hot spot, so we should get used to it. I think this is part of a big boom for Baltimore."

While neighbors believe the new house is a creature of California, its true roots lie in Cincinnati, where Marks, the 11th of 12 children of a small-town Indiana builder, attended architecture school and worked during the early 1960s. Marks came to admire Alvar Aalto, the 20th-century Finnish architect who used smooth white surfaces, flat roofs, and plenty of balconies. Marks was taken with Cincinnati's hills, particularly in the Mount Adams section, where he helped design a house.

He moved to Baltimore in 1965, catching his first glimpse of the city from Warren Avenue, less than 100 yards from where he would one day build his home. Enchanted with the Inner Harbor, he later moved his office to a building with a water view and set up house with his artist wife, Cissy, in an old church in Otterbein.

"When I first came to Maryland, I was amazed at how conservative it really was," he says. "In the city, you didn't have much choice but to design a conventional building."

Walking around southern Baltimore, he spotted a sloped lot at the end of Grindall Street. He filled a folder with sketches for a house. He also drew designs during visits to waterside cities he visited in China, Mexico, Italy and Jamaica.

When the lot's owner, a bed-and-breakfast operator from Westminster, put the land up for sale in November 1996, Marks snapped it up. Some friends thought he was insane for investing in the city, but Marks still had his design notes.

The builders worked from a model, and the construction often seemed open and experimental to them and to Marks, who tinkered with the design every step of the way. Construction on Federal Hill's unstable clay was neither easy nor cheap. (Marks declines to say how much it cost.) And builders Steve Goetz and Louis Barnett received more than their share of parking tickets on narrow Grindall Street. "I never thought I'd build something like this in the city," says Goetz.

Progress has been steady. Marks held his 60th birthday party inside the framework in July. He, his wife, and daughter Lauren, 9, moved in around Thanksgiving. Nearly a year after work began, only landscaping and a few details remain. Marks says he likes the house so much he might begin working at home more.

While neighbors say they like the Marks family, they have not waited for the house's completion to make judgments on the design. Jim Hall, a designer for the city planning department, owns three rowhouses next door. "I have such strong feelings about the new house that I don't know how to deal with them," says Hall, who recently published a book, "Tommy Seven Years," about the block. "I've devoted my whole career to contextualism, buildings that fit with their surroundings. And that isn't contextual."

Across Grindall Street, Ferd Germershausen owns and runs Federal Motors automotive shop with his son Chris, and he is slightly less critical. "I think it's a beautiful house, but it doesn't fit in the neighborhood." The Germershausens are constructing a new, red-brick garage. "Some people say our brick blends in better with the neighborhood than his white brick," says Chris.

Inside his new home, which his wife has decorated, Marks walks by three bedrooms, a two-story atrium, and an elevator. He says he has done his best to fit in while working with a new design.

"We used brick, and brick is Baltimore," he says. "I hope I have the proper respect for the urban setting, but that doesn't mean you copy 18th-century architecture. The city is all about diversity. Let's not put on a lid that is too tight."

Pub Date: 3/02/99