“It’s supposed to feel as if the house has become atmosphere,” she explained. “I’ve been trying to tinker with softer constructions. Earlier in my career, my proposals were for buildings that had violence done to them. I was wary of the perception that I was merely feminine, too airy.”

To become her employee has been likened more to taking holy orders than being hired for a job. The lucky are plucked from courses Dannenforth has taught at Harvard, Yale, and the Architectural Association in London. Acolytes are attired in monastic black or gray—de rigueur, but also required at Studio Forth by strict dress code. They muff their ears in huge headphones and don’t speak unless necessary. Helen’s wardrobe is part nun, part drag queen. A closet of monochromes surprises with the random attack of pigment. Gaudy statement jewelry scaffolds her knuckles and collarbone; she wears the opulence of her matriarch-white hair hanging like a large bellows between her shoulder blades. “They say people deface Rothko and Barnett Newman canvases because of their intense swaths of color,” she told me, holding up a cocktail ensemble red as a spanking. “Wear something like this to both entice and threaten a man.”

Not a single person in the community has heard her raise her voice, yet there is a pervasive fear of rousing her wrath. In general, she is unreadable, sibylline. “She shits ice cubes,” said a former employee. It is rumored that she dismissed an assistant for expressing an opinion while in Zurich for a conference. The two were reclining in a sauna at Therme Vals, and the assistant quipped that Russian Suprematism was “paint-by-numbers for the blind.” Helen shot back that she should pack her bags and return to the States. When, of course, this wasn’t taken seriously and the assistant had the temerity to show her face at dinner, the table was made to wait to eat until she had been checked out of the hotel. Then again, to be a Dannenforth favorite is to gain a second mother, better than a mother. Those chosen few have spent holidays at her side. They have been counseled on their portfolios, their love lives, their childhoods. They have occupied rent-free the guest suite in her loft. Her protégées have also divulged that Helen, oblivious, has entered their rooms unannounced and had conversations about current projects as the protégée is nakedly lounging postcoitus with a paramour.

Romance isn’t something that concerns Helen on a personal level, though she does have a daughter by an estranged ex-husband. Lily, sweet sixteen, came crashing in with keys, boots, and weekender bag during our chat over tea. It would have been easy to mistake her for the pubescent doppelgänger of her mother if not for the bits of leaves in her tangled hair, the wabi-sabi scratches and insect bites on her shins. She had gone on a camping trip with her boyfriend and unpacked by tossing makeup, snacks, tabloids, dirty clothes around the room like so much flotsam, the shipwreckage of a girl. “A girl becomes a woman when she learns everything has its place,” Dannenforth aphorized. Only when she officially introduced us, when I wasn’t distracted by this charming chaos, her sunburned cheeks reminiscent of hammocks and pitchers of lemonade and sneaked cigarettes, the effortless peasant blouse I’m certain cost hundreds of dollars, did I discern the asymmetry in her features that urged me to both look away and peer more closely, in thrall to its peculiarity.