Material Focus: Brick Basics

The living spaces are separated from the sleeping quarters by an elevated bridge, hence the home's name.

The bathroom evokes the building’s industrial bones. The pendant light is from Ikea, and the towel racks are repurposed train car luggage racks. The Carrara tiles are mismatched seconds. “It works if you let yourself not try to fix it,” says Brandon.

Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. "I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture," she says.

Emilio Fuscaldo sits in the garden outside the brick house that he designed for himself and his partner, Anna Krien, on a small subdivided lot in Coburg, a suburb north of Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Nic Granleese.

Architect Alex Gil and his wife, Claudia DeSimio, affixed a 750-square-foot addition to the roof of a 19th century Williamsburg townhouse, transforming their cramped third-floor apartment into a modern duplex.

The façade of the two-story Victorian home remains unchanged, hiding the extent to which its opposite end has been transformed. NOJI Architects was tasked with remedying the lack of light from the property’s rear garden.

With the deliberate exception of its glass wall, the addition blends in seamlessly with the existing Victorian home. Its bricks were repurposed from the demolition process as were the windows for the upper level’s new bedroom.

The travertine floor for the guest bedroom came from a De La Espada showroom in Soho. When moving stores, the owners were considering throwing out their travertine floor, but Dealtry offered to install it in his home. Along with exposed ceiling beams, the tiles provide a sense of texture and warmth to the space. Photo by Tara Donne.

White paint with just a hint of gray dominates the farmhouse, reflecting Kolasiński’s love of bright spaces. The pine wooden floors were also enameled in a white oil imported from Denmark.

In this kitchen, an exposed brick wall stands out against the milky smoothness of the marble tile floors.

Busick refreshed the house’s east-facing façade by painting the trim a bold black that echoes the steel addition at the rear.

Goneau highlighted the red brick wall in the living room by leaving it bare and protecting it behind museum-quality glass. The space also features a floor-to-ceiling window that’s coated on the outside with a reflective film, letting residents keep their curtains open by day without fear of being seen from the street. The green sofa is by St-Laurent Domison and the white oak chairs are by Hans Wegner. All other furniture is custom.

In the farmhouse architect Lucy Marston built for her family in Suffolk, England, she balanced off-the-shelf pieces, such as a velvet-covered sofa from sofa.com, with customized key elements, like the kitchen. The refrigerator is from Fisher & Paykel, and the tiles are from Topps Tiles.

It's traditional among homes in the region to enter through their backdoor, seen here. The door leads directly to the living room.

Brandon and Amy set up different workstations in the living area.

Closet Case To consolidate most appliances and food storage, keep his compact kitchen looking neat, and save money on cabinets, Sherman built a closet into the kitchen wall (“Cabinets are expensive but closets are cheap,” he offers). Inside is a countertop, blackboard surface, toaster oven, garbage cans, magnetic knife rack, and plenty of shelves. When the doors are closed, the unit recedes from view.

Sheridan Coakley, owner of the London-based furnishings purveyor SCP, uses his circa-1970s home as a testing ground for the furnishings he carries in his company’s inventory. In the foreground, a Balzac lounge chair by Matthew Hilton is draped with a Donna Wilson blanket.

Architect David Hill, his wife, Elizabeth, and their three children (from left: Wade, eight, Luke, six, and Breyton, ten), have an unusual home by the standards of their college-town setting in Auburn, Alabama. Built in 1920, the industrial brick building has had previous incarnations as a church, a recycling center, and a pool hall, among others.

The wall surrounding Ravi and Esha Chowdhary’s backyard in Bangalore, India, includes bricks made from soil that was excavated for their home’s foundation.