You would expect to find a certain type of art in Cindy and Armond Schwartz's glass-and-steel compound in University Park: hard-edged, fiercely contemporary.

This is not one of those.

It's a bright, whimsical painting by New York artist Ann Craven. The Easter-egg worthy image depicts a yellow canary perched atop a knotted branch against a sky of bubble gum pink.

The couple – she, a society art adviser and president of the Dallas Architecture Forum, he, a respected physician – has nicknamed the image Tweety Bird. (Its actual title is Yellow Fellow.)

The work pops defiantly on the muted walls of the couple's sparse master suite, where Cindy – sleek bobbed hair, black silk top – interprets it for us.

"When you first look at it, you think, how sweet," she explains, a sly smile gathering at the corner of her lips. "But when you really look at it, the bird is rather sinister."

Our eyes zoom in, noticing for the first time the razor- sharp claws. "It also has some sexual overtones," she adds, which, ahem , become more apparent the longer we gaze, suddenly feeling like Adam and Eve, teeth-deep into a hunk of forbidden fruit and scanning awkwardly for a cover-up.

Whether it's choosing art or shaping the design of the couple's contemporary dream home, Cindy has a philosophy: "There has to be more than the quick 'I get it.' That may be what draws you in, but it won't hold you."

Yes, art and architecture can be approached through the same elements: line, shape, color, texture. But when there's more to it – "even if it's just the meaning it holds for you personally," she says – that's what makes it endure.

This is clearly a house with staying power.

From the curb, the soaring two-story structure is a windowless fortress of white. But the home's interior is a wide-eyed commune with nature, thanks to vast expanses of glass that wrap a central courtyard and pool.

Pennsylvania bluestone floors flow from the front door all the way into the rear garden, visually connecting indoors with out. It's also the perfect surface for riding bikes and Rollerblading, something sons Andrew and Armond III, and daughter Robyn, all now in their 20s, once did regularly. (Cindy swears the mud wipes right up.)

Playing amidst pieces by Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns made for "an amazing environment to live in," says Robyn, now settled in LA with her husband, Michael Siegel. (We reached her via cellphone on the beach where she swears she was studying for her masters in art history). She's recently partnered with her mother to form a tag-team art consulting practice, a job her childhood home uniquely prepared her for.

"I would show my friends the art, and we'd sneak the Robert Mapplethorpe book off the shelf and take it upstairs. I'm sure our family was considered unconventional, but that was just the Schwartz house."

The art-focused and family-friendly nature of the home was intentional, the result of the Schwartzes' partnership with an unlikely architectural duo from Longview, Texas. But the quest for the ideal Dallas nest began years earlier.

The Schwartzes' first Dallas home, chosen quickly during a hasty relocation from LA, "did not make me happy," Cindy says. The builder's spec job near SMU "defied description" in its mish-mash of architectural styles.

The couple found their current University Park lot (then occupied by a deserted ranch) in the early 1990s and began to draw up extensive, and pricey, architectural plans.

Cindy had a nagging feeling the design wasn't right, but she didn't have her aha moment until the couple visited a girlfriend in Longview, Cindy's hometown. The friend's house, designed by local architects Robert Allen and Jim Buie, was an epiphany.

"Everywhere I looked, there was something beautiful," Cindy recalls. "It didn't knock you over the head and say, 'look at me!,' but the house was filled with subtle, lovely elements."

On the car ride home, she announced to Armond that they were scrapping their previous plans and Allen and Buie would be building their new house.

Fortunately, Cindy was driving.

"It just had to be right,"

she says in her own defense, citing what a college ceramics professor told her years

ago: "Once it's fired, it's permanent."

Allen and Buie asked the Schwartzes for a design wish list. Cindy wrote 10 pages; Armond offered a single verbal request: "I love TV." (To wit, each room in the Schwartz home contains a television, including one in the main living area inset behind black glass, echoing the adjacent fireplace.)

Buie was confident the project would be striking. "Cindy was going to insist on that," he says by phone from his Longview office with an affectionate laugh.

Every detail was considered, from cubbyholes in the hallway for the kids' book bags to electrical outlets inside the bathroom drawers to avoid countertop clutter. (The streamlined effect is magnified by the spa-like bathroom's mirrored walls, broken up only by a pair of '70s Saporiti Italia chairs.)

For the dining area, Buie says, Cindy wanted a large table, so they custom-crafted one: "We made stainless steel bases that were painted black on the interior and had an engineer design the slender railing that goes across to support the glass top."

Most furniture groupings, including the living room's central cluster of Mies van der Rohe chrome-and-leather armchairs and Knoll Pfister sofa, were designed to float, leaving the home's structure visible. "It makes sense with the entire Le Corbusier idea of the house," Cindy says, referring to the modernist architect whose most famed furniture pieces were designed with their tubular metal framework exposed.

The home's stainless-steel staircase, which almost appears freshly lowered from the ceiling, is equally raw but refined. The steps are a zigzag folded-plate design topped with an industrial cable handrail.

It's a dramatic backdrop for a home punctuated with striking art. A Tim Gardner photorealistic watercolor of a bodybuilder bulges from the bookshelf in the front study. Dinner is served beneath a misty photograph by Thomas Struth. ("That's S-T-R-U-T-H," Cindy jokes. "I was the eighth-grade spelling bee champ at Longview Junior High.")

Upstairs, you'll find prints by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Brice Marden. Many were purchased by Cindy when she was studying for her masters in museum education and art history and Armond was in medical school – paid off in installments thanks to an arrangement with Ray and Patsy Nasher's art dealer at the time.

"We were newly married and broke," Cindy says, "but I was sick for art even then, and I would hide new pieces under the bed until I worked up the nerve to tell Armond what I had bought."

You won't find any Warhols under the Schwartzes' bed these days (as far as we know anyway), but the couple's commitment to fine lines, of all kinds, remains evident.

"This house fits our aesthetic, the way we live," says Cindy. "It's what thrills us. When I walk in here every day, I just feel like – ahh."

E-mail cwynn@dallasnews.com

The game room is an appropriate spot for Cindy Schwartz's favorite new piece, Temple 5. The LightJet digital print depicts an apocalyptic vision of modern times, a visual mash-up of Hummers crunching down from the sky, McDonald's golden arches and a slew of tabloid celebrities – Lindsay Lohan, Anna Nicole Smith, Ashlee Simpson (before and after), OJ Simpson, even the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The piece's separate Apple hard drive plays a corresponding soundtrack of helter-skelter pop references.

Temple 5 is the brainchild of twentysomething West Coast artists Case Simmons and Andrew Burke, whose work has already found its way into the Guggenheim. Kimberly Light, who represents the duo at her trendy Kim Light/LightBox gallery in LA, says they are "making symmetry and order" from popular media, combining "snapshots from Hollywood paparazzi next to figures from Renaissance painting, next to promotional images of consumer products."

"It's so smart and so right now," says Schwartz. "It's also disturbing and disorienting, but it's that tension that makes you think and gives it such power."

More info at simmonsandburke.com