A Renovated Farmhouse in Denmark: This beautiful renovation has a classic Scandinavian feel and soft, but simple color scheme. From The Style Files.

An Introduction to Modern Textiles: Kit out your furniture in luxurious silk or no-frills leather,; textiles can add just as much dimension to room as art, and can be equally collectible.

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

The dwelling showcases the designer’s collection of Danish chairs and loungers from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s — including pieces designed by Kofod Larsen, J.L Moller, Harry Ostergaard, Bruno Mathsson, and Hans J. Wegner.

Phillips designed Judith a stark white, glass-fronted art studio.

The architect chose granite for the house’s base, zinc for its roof, and Scandinavian pinewood for cladding—all materials that complement the nearby gray stone building.

Faux timber doors, painted black, along with a brick facade help the dwelling blend with its surroundings: the Victorian homes of the Moseley neighborhood in Birmingham, UK.

The pair’s art covers a cork wall where Eva Luna reads in a vintage Danish lounge chair.

Resident Peter Østergaard (with Maja, 6, and Carl, 20 months) and architect and photographer Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen have been best friends since they were 13, which makes for easy collaboration. Says Bjerre-Poulsen: “There are always a lot of challenges in a renovation, but Peter and Åsa trusted my judgment and gave me a completely free hand. Usually it’s hard to push people into unconventional solutions, but Peter has all these wild and crazy ideas.” One such idea was to embed a transparent glass-and-iron door in the floor, operated by a hydraulic pump, which allows access to the subterranean wine cellar. At night, the lit-up cellar glows, lending the compact living room an increased sense of verticality.

Learning HubAlready more than a year into construction, the Learning Hub at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore obliterates the notion of monotonous university buildings. With endless books and MOOCs available online, Heatherwick jokes that these days you could do an entire PhD in bed, adding that the only purpose of attending university these days is to meet people. To facilitate real world connections and learning—and to break down the traditional layout of professor on one side of the room, with students on the other—the Learning Hub’s tutorial rooms have no corners. Photo courtesy: Heatherwick Studio

Yang Yeo and his girlfriend Ching Ian relax on the back stoop of their renovated and radically updated Singapore shophouse—an archetypal building type in this busy port city. “Shophouses brought back memories of our childhood,” says Yeo.

Built in the 1920s, and used until the 1990s, the Grain Silo was once the tallest building in the city. It stands adjacent to both the V&A Waterfront, the upscale mall complex that is the single biggest tourist draw in the country, and a working harbor. “It’s been the elephant in the room,” Heatherwick says. Photo COurtesy: V&A Waterfront

Knocking the Grain Silo down and starting over again was an option, but not a terribly appealing one to Heatherwick given the building’s idiosyncratic eight-story concrete tubes and its obvious rawness. “What are you going to make that’s more interesting?” he says. By cutting the square and round tubes at angles—as well as the interesting bits in between—a central space will be carved out, and flooded with light from curved glass, to stay “true to the structure but fresh to the eye.” Photo courtesy: Heatherwick Studio

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art“This is a cellular building made from a bunch of tubes. Big, big concrete tubes,” Heatherwick says. From the very beginning, one of the questions was whether or not to keep the building. While shiny new museums are popping up all over Asia, that approach didn’t make sense here in Cape Town. “Our role has been to find a language that keeps the soul of this building that functioned for so many years.” Photo courtesy: Heatherwick Studio

Tubiness at its best: “The project has been about carving out space in which African art can be displayed. In the process of doing that, we’re celebrating the cellular structure of this building,” Heatherwick says. Photo courtesy: Heatherwick Studio

A covered walkway provides a sheltered passage between the main house and studio. The fire pit is used during social gatherings.

"It only cost about $48,000 to build, which was incredibly cheap," says Turner of the Stealth Barn. "We got the Timber Frame Company to supply the shell, then we clad it and fitted out the interior and windows ourselves. The idea was to take the archetypal black tar-painted agricultural building and make an almost childlike icon of that."

The Floating Farmhouse’s semitransparent addition has a roofline that matches the pitch of the original 1820s farmhouse. A porch, tucked under the side eaves, is cantilevered over a stream that runs through the property. Ikea loungers are illuminated from the interior by commercial gymnasium lights repurposed as pendant lamps.

Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner in his studio. Photo courtesy PP MØBLER.

Jef Raskin, designer of Bloxes and inventor of the Macintosh computer, circa 1970. “Architecture and the arts in 1970s L.A. contributed to the sense that anythingis possible here—that rules can be broken.” —Kimberli Meyer, director, Mak Center Photo by: David Wing

Tom Givone's current weekend abode, nicknamed the Floating Farmhouse, is—so far—his capstone project, a synthesis of personal taste, material experimentation, and historically sensitive restoration: a living laboratory for how to bring the vernacular past into the present.

The second-floor office is housed inside a rounded rectangle of concrete that the architect inserted on top of the old farmhouse.

After living on and studying a woodsy acre of land in North Zealand, Denmark, architect Jesper Brask cleared a stand of pine trees and, from the timber, built a getaway open to its surroundings. The house, which Brask shares with his wife, Lene, and sons, Kristian, Jens, and Niels, is used mainly in summer, when the weather is optimal for throwing open the glass doors.

The north wall of the IST home functions as a cut-away, offering a peek inside an efficient yet cozy dwelling. Architect Peter Jurkovič built the home for a woman who had sold her flat in the big city of Bratislava and wanted something that reminded her of the village life of her childhood.

Classic butterfly chairs from Universal Patio Furniture are stationed by the pool. The mural is by street artist Morley, a close friend.

The house’s new lime plaster walls, seen here in the courtyard, contrast with the old brick wall that divides the house from Kolasiński’s adjoining carpentry shop. Though the house itself is small, the outdoor spaces and furniture studio bring its total square footage to nearly 11,000 square feet.

For the bedroom, the designer selected a bed by Muji and floor lamps by Lightyears.

Brothers’s workspace uses skylights to let in sun. The lack of windows helps him focus on his craft.

Living Moss wall in powder room created by Minarc.

Choosing a kitchen or bathroom countertop can be nerve-wracking, and we understand why—they can be one of the most expensive aspects of a renovation, with the added responsibility of impacting the aesthetics of a space. Read on as we work our way through the pros and cons of seven of the most common countertop materials.

Christine (at left), and Amanda (at right) chat with David’s sister Aroha Yates-Smith (center) in the kitchen.

To raise awareness about biodiversity in cities and the benefits it delivers, the EEA façade, overlooking one of the most prominent squares of Copenhagen, Denmark, gets shielded with a vertical garden (shaped like a map of the European continent!) which uses a mesh pattern, similar to a cross-stich pattern, that fills in dirt and various flowers. Via WalkOnWaterOrDrown.

The building was built in 1910. "It’s a pretty raw space with rough exposed brick, barrel vaulted ceilings, original hardwoods, and exposed ducting," Greenawalt says. "We tried to use industrial materials—stainless steel, perforated steel, brick—in a more refined way for the kitchen."

Shannon Leahy designed this 800-square-foot art studio with radiant-heated floors and solar power. The solar panels are installed on the main house.

Among the first Passive Houses in France, this bamboo-clad farmhouse by the Parisian firm Karawitz Architecture only uses a tenth of the energy a conventionally constructed home does. Photo by Nicholas Calcott.

Each Christmas, Marcel Wanders's staff gives him a group studio portrait. A few years ago it was a set of matryoshka dolls!