One chilly February three years ago, Edgar Papazian and Michelle Lenzi stepped through slushy suburban New York streets, stuffed their car as full of belongings as would fit, then drove away. They spent a month crossing the country before settling in Portland, Oregon, to get a new lease on life—and to buy their first home.

Tired of tiny apartments, sky-high rents, and the relentless grind of their jobs, the couple decided to pack it all in and try someplace new. And Papazian, an architect, was itching to design his own house but couldn’t afford to in New York. Drawn to Portland by the architectural innovation and the urbanism they saw on three previous trips, the couple simply picked up and moved west.

“New York is built; it’s all there already,” Papazian says. Portland, however, still has a sense of the frontier, with wide-open spaces, underdeveloped land, and affordable real estate. After arriving in March, the pair immediately started house hunting, walking up uneven stairs, looking at cracked foundations, and poking around the oddly renovated rooms of more than 50 potential homes. They had no particular style in mind: “We just wanted to do something really fun on a budget,” Papazian recalls. Every time they saw a place, he would sketch how he’d redo it, taking down a carport here, adding a second floor there.

Then that June, the couple spotted a modest 1940s home in the Mount Tabor neighborhood. The topography around the house and the large backyard—set on the slopes of an extinct volcano in the middle of the city—appealed to the couple. The house itself was in great structural shape but was otherwise bland in every way—which proved a selling factor for the couple. “You don’t want to put a funky addition on a beautiful bungalow,” says Lenzi, a genetics researcher. “You could, but you’d end up making enemies, and we wanted our neighbors to like us.” A simple gabled dwelling with basic moldings, a cramped kitchen, and few windows, the home’s only renovation over the past 50 years was the addition of shag carpeting in the ’70s. “It was begging for something,” Papazian remembers.

The first night after seeing their soon-to-be home, Papazian drew up the swooping curves of two dormers with big overhangs in front and back that he envisioned enclosing the house. But in terms of specifics, like which rooms go where, the couple first moved into the house and spent a year figuring out what they did and didn’t like before they ever picked up a sledgehammer.

Though they prefer to live small and were happy with the overall 1,323 square feet (not including an unfinished basement), they knew they wanted an extra bedroom and to make the upstairs suitable for living, since it was basically a narrow tube of space under the eaves. They decided to shift the floor plan (and knock down walls), extending the kitchen through what was originally one of the two downstairs bedrooms and putting a dining room in the other bedroom. Instead of entering right into the living room, they created an entrance hallway with a closet for shoes and coats so people didn’t track in mud, a problem in the perennially wet climate. On one side of the entrance is a bedroom cum office; on the other side, the living room. A renovated bathroom completes the floor plan downstairs.

The second floor was perhaps the most ambitious part of the project. The couple was determined to fit two bedrooms and a full bath in the limited space. Papazian reoriented the house so that the main axis went from front to back, instead of side to side, by putting in the two large arched dormers that were in his original sketch. Doing so would also create an overhang in the back and a porch overlooking the backyard. But how to affordably build the massive dormers? “I remembered seeing these Quonset huts around town,” says Papazian. “It’s a comforting, simple system where the skin is the structure.” He was able to order Quonset-style prefab galvanized steel arches, which cost a total of around $7,000, bent to his exact specifications.

They hired a contractor and started demolition in June 2009. The couple moved into what they called their “New York studio apartment” in the unfinished basement, a 12x14 space walled in by plastic sheets and fitted with only necessities like a bed, a fridge, a hot plate, and a couch. The back wall of the house came down, and the roof was chopped to the rafters. Spiders crawled over them as they slept, and neighborhood cats wandered in as the house was stripped to its studs, leaving the whole thing open to the outdoors. When their home was finally finished the following spring, Lenzi was seven months pregnant and Papazian was running around with a paintbrush to get everything done.

The result, though, was worth it, and the home perfectly suits the family, which now includes 1-year-old Giovanna. Outside, the massive steel arches frame the second level of the house like eyebrows. Inside, these arches are echoed in soft edges and round spaces everywhere, from the bookshelves that encase the central stairway to the coved tops of the walls to the bending lines of their furniture. “I’m a curvy guy in a rectilinear world,” says Papazian, with a laugh. He elaborates, “It’s a completely different feeling to be in a curved space than in a rectilinear space.” The curves also open the space up, since your eye slides over surfaces instead of stopping at angles and sharp edges.

Lest the house become an architectural Hallmark card, however, there’s an industrial aspect to it all. “I wanted to use off-the-shelf products as a reminder of how the house was put together,” Papazian says. Metal columns anchor the house, there are exposed bolts and fasteners on the walls and arches, and inset fluorescent lighting (found more often in offices and schools than in an architect’s home) illuminates the living room. If you look in the corners upstairs, there are still factory inspection stickers on the corrugated metal arches. Honest to his materials and forms, “it is what it is,” Papazian says proudly. “It’s a little on the rough side, and the process determined the product, in a sense.”

As Giovanna gazes up at the sunlight bouncing off the metal ridges that make up the ceiling of her bedroom, Lenzi prepares lunch downstairs, a balmy afternoon breeze blowing in through the massive sliding glass door overlooking the cedar and Douglas fir trees in the backyard. Papazian smiles at his daughter adoringly, then looks around at their house. “Doing something like this is part of what drew us to Portland,” he says. “If we did this in New York or New Jersey, we would have been thrown out on our asses; it’s much more closed-minded there. Here, people have a chance to think about the quality of their space and create something that’s specific to them.”

Finally, it seems, the family has found a place to truly call home.

To check out even more tips from Papazian, see pages 2 and 3.