When Hans Murman and Ulla Alberts set out two years ago to build a summer home on Gotland, an island south of Stockholm, Alberts’s family teased them about spoiling the compound. Her mother and five siblings all have neighboring vacation homes on Gotland, all traditional white stone cottages. Murman and Alberts are architects with adventurous taste and it was clear they would dissent. “Everyone was a little nervous about what we might build,” Murman says. “They’re afraid of modern architecture.”

In mischievous response to the familial concerns, Murman photographed the grove of juniper trees on his site and printed the images on a broad swath of plastic netting, which he then wrapped around three sides of a simple two-bedroom box of oiled pine the couple constructed themselves for $100,000. The netting acts as camouflage, allowing the house to vanish among the trees at dusk.

Graphic trickery aside, the house does make use of its surroundings, particularly the late-summer sunsets. To take advantage of the lingering Scandinavian light, the couple and their three children eat dinners cooked on a woodstove in a kitchen that can be opened wide to the western sky. Extending outdoors from the kitchen is a wooden platform that feels more like a dock than a deck. Murman and Alberts amble out on their maritime deck to meet arriving friends, but because it has no furniture, when they close the sliding doors and withdraw into total privacy, the platform takes on a blank, almost inhospitable character. “When [the sliding doors] are open we’re inviting people in,” Murman says, “and when they’re closed the house is just for us.”

Curran House San Francisco, California
Designed by Andrea Cochran

With its drifters and drug dealers, San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood hardly seems ideal for raising a brood. But given its proximity to downtown jobs, it has become home to a growing number of immigrant families. With that in mind, the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. set out to bring the benefits of thoughtful design to low-income residents when it built Curran House two years ago.

Considering the 67-unit building’s easy access to public transportation—most residents don’t own cars—the developer dispensed with onsite parking and with the savings hired landscape architect Andrea Cochran to create what she calls a “decompression garden.” A 20-foot palm tree stands like a sentinel at the entrance above a concrete seat wall that extends past the flax ground cover into the glassed-in lobby. “The street tends to be cacophonous and predatory,” says Cochran, “but once the gate
is closed, you’re in a transitional safety zone.”

At the rear of the lobby a garage door opens onto a bamboo-edged courtyard where the gurgling of a polished-concrete fountain drowns out the welter of street noise. To further dampen the sirens and screech of the street, and to discourage noisy gatherings or children’s wild play, Cochran planted the wings of the courtyard with tree ferns and baby tears.

If the courtyard is for meditation, then the roof deck is for mingling. Dominated by tables, benches, and freestanding planters filled with citrus trees, pomegranates, and kiwi vines, the common space also has 23 galvanized-metal agricultural troughs where residents may grow their own plants and vegetables. “This is where people talk,” Cochran says. “This is where people really come together.”

Jones REsidence Key West, Florida
Designed by Raymond Jungles

The walls of a home sometimes stand well beyond the walls of the house. Such is the case at Susan Henshaw Jones’s retreat in Key West, Florida, where the living area spills from an undistinguished 1940s suburban-style house and flows into pocket gardens and toward a pool enclosed by a living wall of dense vegetation and colored panels inspired by Luis Barragán, the godfather of tropical modernism.

“She liked the idea of the living environment extending from property line to property line,” says Raymond Jungles, Jones’s landscape architect.

To create a sense of containment on the 10,000-square-foot corner lot, Jungles inched the fences in from the property line, and planted a dense screen of Jamaican caper, cinnamon bark, and other native vegetation on either side of them. The effect is of a clearing in the tropical brush with ample sunshine—and enough privacy to free the house of curtains.

The plantings are so thick that visitors might not find their way into the clearing at all if not for a roadside gateway with a vine-covered pergola. Just inside the gateway, a travertine walkway flows like a carpet to the house—pausing to make its way across a shallow pool—and continues on as interior flooring, a detail that helps to blur the border between inside and out.

This home is about the outdoor delights of tropical flora. With that in mind, Jones painted the house an unexceptional shade of white so that it would defer to the garden and a narrow pool, where water cascades from a spout protruding from a chartreuse wall.

The pool is the heart of the house, drawing the family outside with its sounds and reflected light. “Water is a way of keeping open space, like grass, except that it’s ephemeral,” Jungles says. “It sparkles and trickles.”

Gamble House New York, New York
Designed by Kari Elwell Katzander of Mingo Design

The high-ceilinged rooms were in handsome condition when Vernice Gamble, an accountant, bought a brownstone on 136th Street in Harlem to share with her mother. The backyard, by contrast, was a dumping ground of concrete blocks, broken glass, and tree stumps. “It was the worst site conditions I’d ever seen,” says Kari Elwell Katzander of Mingo Design, a Manhattan landscaper. “Vernice was horrified to even go back there.”

Implausible as it might seem, Gamble hoped to turn the mess into a backyard refuge from the grit and noise of the city, and from the demands of her office life. “She wanted to feel like she was no longer in Manhattan,” Katzander says. “She wanted to feel transported to another environment.”

Even without debris, the narrow city yard can be a landscaper’s curse. Katzander softened its edges and gave it the illusion of depth with an undulating path
of tumbled stones edged with cedar stakes. The curved walk was inspired by the Great Wave at Kanagawa, a well-known woodblock print from circa 1832 by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. She further borrowed the wood print’s deep blue for the garden walls. The curve also had practical benefits: “It gives you the sense of going further back than you actually have,” Katzander says. “It’s a psychological trick.”

Among other things, the twisting path helped create distinct garden areas screened for privacy with Little Leaf Euonymus, a hardy evergreen shrub. Because hundreds of neighboring windows overlook the garden, Katzander enclosed a sitting area with a trellis made of braided stainless steel wire covered in trumpet vine. The result is two outdoor rooms in one small yard: a patio with a view for the daughter and a place at the
far end where her mother can leave the city behind.