Architect Paul Hinkin and his partner, Chrissy Pearce, bought and restored a 538-square-foot Deckhouse at Emsworth Yacht Harbour in Hampshire, England.

With the help of builder Peter Watts, the couple returned the house to its original early-1970s glory, utilizing the space beneath for both boat and car.

Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton behind their London home.

The dining room features a Glo-Ball T table lamp by Jasper Morrison.

“I wanted to do a house that belonged on the site,” she says.

Who says kitchen islands can’t work in small spaces too? A design-minded pair ensures that their tiny seaside getaway in Hampshire, England, is shipshape. At 538 square feet, this home is efficiently designed, with an interior that was influenced by the compact housing that you see in Japan. The kitchen and island have been sized to fit the small space, but the island’s minimal finishings keep it feeling appropriate.

A circular tower echoes the former gas storage cylinder that once occupied its place. It houses a private study.

Near the room’s curving wall, a Verner Panton chair joins a K2 B console table by Tecta, topped by a vintage mirror by Robert Welch. The wall light is from Flos. “If I had more space, I’d just fill it with more stuff,” says Pearce.

The cedar-and-glass structure rises over an expansive rear patio. Although it is larger than some of its neighbors, the home nearly matches the height line of the surrounding houses due to its flat, modern roof.

The master bedroom echoes the house’s black-and-white exterior and includes a custom-built storage unit that the architect designed for the space.

In Kathryn Tyler’s finished home, a palette of wood, concrete, and painted brick forms a neutral backdrop for vintage treasures, including a $30 dining table, $3 poster, and a set of 1950s Carl Jacobs Jason chairs she snagged on eBay for $400.

These wood-wrapped spaces take oriented strand board to new heights.

To integrate the former postman’s cottage with the new design, architect David Sheppard added a concrete column adjacent to an existing stone chimney and a new slate chimney “at the heart of the composition.” From this, the roof structure fans out; the small structure now serves as an anteroom.

In the living room, Arne Jacobsen Swan chairs flank a Marcel Breuer for Isokon nesting table. Above the Florence Knoll–designed credenza is a print by English artist Terry Frost. The adjacent deck holds Breuer’s Folding Armchair and a table from Aram in London.

For a bit of elevation in the overwhelmingly horizontal compound, step onto the deck of the Stealth Barn. A strip of mowed grass delineates a path between the two structures; otherwise the grasses grow wild.

The two structures are in constant dialogue. Not only are their forms in sympathy, but as they're set at right angles to one another, they are rarely out of view.

Tucked away in a corner of Norfolk County, England, this pair of barns—one new, one renovated—sit low in the vast countryside.

In the eat-in portion of the kitchen, a George Nelson Bubble Lamp hangs above an Artek table and chairs by Alvar Aalto.

The house is located on a 25-acre site. It sat unsold on the property for two years before the couple discovered it.

An enormous bi-fold door from Sun Paradise peels back to open the upgraded kitchen-dining area to a new raised terrace. The home's exterior is wrapped in an insulated render system.

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.

The room’s opposite side holds the companion Breuer nesting tables and an Eames Aluminum Group chair and ottoman.

The home’s carbon footprint is small. The architect installed green technologies like Warmcell Insulation, made from recycled waste paper, and an external air source heat pump, which absorbs warmth from the outside and transfers it to a subfloor system. Other sustainable features include passive ventilation, roof-mounted photovoltaic panels, a biomass boiler room, and rainwater harvesting systems.

The most unique feature of the Lighthouse is the windcatcher, or the vertical void that cuts down through the center of the house from the roof.

"You become very much more aware of the landscape by putting objects in it," says Merer. The historical landmarks of the town are beautifully framed by the angular metal lookouts. The Cor-Ten exterior is corrosion-resistant and will develop a unique surface patina over time.

A glass-fronted portico leads from the cottage’s kitchen past four bedrooms to the new tower, accessed by a sculptural rectangular staircase. “The courtyard glazing is designed to open up this walkway to the outside and to brake up its sense of division,” Whittaker says.

Park Hill is only a five-minute walk from the city, separated from it by train tracks. Photo by: Keith Collie

The house's plans.

Subverting the traditional, conservatively cozy British barn conversion, Carl Turner created a getaway in rural Norfolk for himself and his friends to visit, repose, and consider the beauty of agrarian minimalism. Turner reclaimed most of the timber used for the flooring as he renovated buildings in London. He thought his stockpile was big enough for the Ochre Barn, but the scale of the place defeated him. The solution, surprisingly, was eBay, turning up an old mill’s worth of boards.

The home's defining quality is its airy, double-height spaces.

“This has been a fascinating project,” Whittaker says. “It ties together issues of sustainability, adaptation, and alteration to a historic industrial structure and building within an area of outstanding natural beauty.”

The new colorful facade was developed with the English Heritage society to ensure it was consistent with the original design. Photo by: Daniel Hopkinson

The two structures meet at the cottage’s northeastern end, where the contrast between them—the rough warmth of local stone and the rusty patina of Cor-Ten steel—is most striking.

An envelope of Cor-Ten steel clads the structure’s timber frame. “We drew on and referenced the use of corrugated steel sheet in 20th-century agricultural buildings and the way rusted steel fits into the existing range of materials in this area,” Whittaker explains. It was difficult to find a supplier in the UK, though, as Cor-Ten is much harder than typical steel and manufacturers can be wary of producing it. In the end, the team was able to procure it locally from Hollywood Design in London.

The addition forms a horseshoe around a buried brick pit from the original gasworks building. During construction, workers unearthed a large valve and its associated pipework, the only historic features of the plant to survive. The owners plan to display them in the central courtyard as a reminder of the site’s former life.

Architecture: The Shard, LondonRenzo Piano’s London skyscraper is currently the tallest building in Western Europe at over one thousand feet high.