The Perth residence of Renee Coleman via the Design Files.

If you're looking for the ultimate minimalist bed frame, a platform bed with edges that extend beyond the mattress allow it to double as a bedside table, eliminating the need for other furniture.

Lara's home office consists of a MacBook Air and Ferruccio Laviani Abat-Jour lamp for Kartell.

The courtyard is just one of many open spaces that will be highly utilized—in the non-winter months anyway. Concrete worked well with developing the language of FlatPak. The second level is a wood panel that can be clad in corrugated metal or cedar—different layers that can be plugged in like covers on your cellphone.

The living room is populated with a molded plywood Eames chair and a vintage Italian lamp.

Gaffney's cousin lives in the house just in front. To give a bit of perspective, this photo was likely taken just feet in front of the waist-high wall that runs between the two houses's yards.

A carpet of custom tile created by Navone punctuates a corridor on the first floor.

A familiar scene in the Benoit home: Peter paints at the Steelcase desk—"I do all my work here," he says—while Ando sits nearby, waiting for attention.

A 606 Universal Shelving System by Dieter Rams for Vitsoe hangs tough on the only opaque wall of the living room. Russell-Clarke and Moolsintong designed the coffee table, and Marcel Wanders gets credit for the Bottoni sofa for Moooi.

A good dose of inspiration from Luis Barragán turned a dark and beleaguered midcentury house into a family home for the ages. The paint colors chosen by the residents and architect Linda Taalman are American Cheese and Blushing Bride, both by Benjamin Moore, creating a tapestry of color and texture.

For the dining room, Freeman and Feldmann swapped their tiny table for developer John Walker's larger one since he was moving into a smaller space. They topped it with a $12 pendant lamp from Ikea and finished the "room" with a counsel from West Elm.

Architect Bruce Bolander made the most of a limited footprint in a house he designed in a Malibu canyon. With the small bedroom unable to accommodate any "normal" size desk, the architect designed a very thin custom steel desk where resident Heidi Wright works. The floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors from Metal Window Corporation open the entire corner of the room up to the outdoors. “The mountains across the way are almost like another wall—they contain the space to the point that you feel like you’re in a much bigger space, that you’re part of the overall landscape,” says Bolander. Photo by J Bennett Fitts.

The back of the house has sliding doors that open far enough to expose the entire livingroom to the families' back yard.

The Branch Double Floor Lamp is inspired by nature. Designed like a tree, the lamp’s base is elevated in a tripod design, resembling exposed roots. The column—or trunk—of the lamp yields two branches, comprised of perforated metal shells atop diffuser lenses.

Furniture throughout the house echoes the soft materiality of the architectural details, which include original pine floorboards refinished with lye and wood soap. The music room armchair and footstool are vintage, from Ercol; the blue-gray Grasshopper floor lamp is by Greta Grossman from Gubi.

A new addition to Sea Ranch’s enclave of utopian homes, this structure (and the separate guesthouse seen here) clad in rough concrete and Cor-ten steel seamlessly blends in with its half-a-century-old California neighbors. Designed by the dean of the Woodbury School of Architecture and the head of the University of Oregon’s architecture department, its spaces flow into one another underneath an angled plywood ceiling and illuminate built-in furniture crafted from vertical-grain Douglas fir.

In the entryway, a Tati lamp by Ferruccio Laviani for Kartell sits on a shelf Christopher made from kitchen cabinetry scraps.

The second floor holds three bedrooms and a living area for the girls. Here, Paula, 11, and Sofia, 9, hang out near an IKEA PS 2012 sofa by Nike Karlsson. The slatted wall at left allows a view to the downstairs.

At a renovated farmhouse in the Italian countryside, a crisp, modern white plaster fireplace and hearth infuse the interior with coziness and warmth. The firewood is stacked in a nearly-frameless niche next to the fireplace that is lined with metal, adding a bit of shine that contrasts with the rustic firewood and wood ceiling and beams above.

Räsymatto bedding by Marimekko in the studio is complemented by a green Anglepoise lamp from Sydney boutique Planet Furniture.

ARCO FLOOR LAMP A legendary icon, the Arco lamp designed by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for FLOS was first released in 1962. A heavy marble base balances and suspends the swooping stem and polished Aluminum dome. To coincide with FLOS and Arco’s fiftieth anniversary, this masterpiece was updated with LED technology, adding high performance to an already impeccable design.

On one side of the house, a white central staircase leads to a split-level landing the Robertsons call "the reading room." "We needed a place to hang out and for the kids to read," explains owner Vivi Nguyen-Robertson. Awaiting the birth of the couple's son, she relaxes in a built-in reading nook in the library.

Roberto Burneo designed this home for his eldest niece, her husband, and their three young children in a suburb outside Quito, the capital of Ecuador. The house is set on a flat expanse of land with fruit trees, and Burneo's design "guides the social areas inward in order to link them to the gardens.”

The ground-floor sauna, one of the home’s central gathering spots, is built from stained alder. The electric heater is from the Finnish company Iki.

Burneo took advantage of the perpendicular orientation of the volumes to create outdoor spaces that look out to the gardens.

Designed in 1960, the house was originally a lodge to accommodate horse trails. Throughout the years, the house has expanded with various additions and renovations.

Sawn wood planks add texture to the interior walls.

Burneo oriented the house in a pair of perpendicular volumes. The ground floor houses the public areas, including a study, while the top volume, housing the bedrooms and a family room, is oriented north-south, allowing for warm sunlight and a visual orientation toward the gardens.

When the Casali family gave Michael Krus and Prishram Jain of TACT Architecture free rein to work with unconventional materials, the architects responded by creating a geometric 4,300-square-foot smart home encased in aluminum panels by Agway Metals. The front facade features Cor-Ten steel fabricated by Praxy Cladding.

The house's plans.

The custom kitchen counters are concrete, and the yellow dining chairs add a welcome splash of color.

“There’s a presence to that place—it’s vast, and constantly shifting,” Moffitt says. “It was clear that this house should be an observation shed for the changing landscape beyond.”

Burneo added exposed brick to his palette of interior materials.