It’s been about two weeks since Jennifer Love Hewitt and her husband, Brian Hallisay, purchased a new residence. The newly-built home—a contemporary Cape style—sapped $6.1 million from the couple’s collective wallet, but repaid them with 6,000 square feet of interiors, and a shared living area boasting excellent interior-exterior flow.

And so onto the open market goes the couple’s outgoing property, an exceedingly warm, timber-clad modern-style in Pac Pal the duo would like to exchange for $4.2 million. The 2007-built house is located in the El Medio Bluffs neighborhood, and contains four bedrooms and five baths in 3,160 square feet of interiors.

From the street, the house cuts a fine figure of a latter-day modern, with plentiful wood, a bit of concrete, and blue accents and a terrace balustrade in blue glass. Framed as it is in a pleasingly green frame of privacy hedge, shrub and the occasional tree, it boasts a distinctive spirit of a Northwestern modern, and an unusually fine balance between the architectural style’s angularity and the naturalism of the whole.

Within, the home sustains that poise, and the design works in the occasional evocation of liberation as well, most convincingly in the open-concept common area, where the ceiling abruptly rushes to the second floor, leaving a second-floor gallery and a great deal of breathing room in its wake.

The master terrace boasts its own privacy landscaping, with a series of hedge planters that protect the space from prying eyes. Out back, the same story; bamboo, strategically planted, lending an Eastern flavor to the yard and small recreational pool area.