This garage space uses iconic checkerboard floor tiles to contrast the rustic barn door that provides entry to the rest of The Barn.

Another view of the garage reveals its extensive space to house vehicles and protect them from the elements.

The extensive use of natural wood on nearly every surface makes the inside of The Barn feel like an extension of the landscape outside.

The Lotus wallpaper pattern by Galbraith and Paul is produced in-studio with the help of a digital printer.

A small dining space and kitchen area blend into the expansive wood paneling used throughout The Barn.

Architect Francesco Librizzi built the staircase for the Casa G project as a means to slow the ascent, to create stations that infused the interior with life.

the reflectivity of the brass kitchen island makes it seem to dematerialize.

Manual Coffee Maker The first entry in his new Manual houseware lines, the MCM exemplifies Berman’s approach, slowly crafting products at the intersection of design and food.

Jimena makes use of a giant chalkboard just outside.

White prefabricated cabinets and countertops make for a streamlined kitchen.

This living/bedroom space showcases neutral tones and shades of white to contrast the continued use of natural, treated wood surfaces.

The bed in Sara’s room has been in the family since the early 1900s.

The bedroom and bathroom make up the private zones on the top floor.

Julia: How to Make a Concrete Camera Are you looking for a creative project for the weekend? Well look no further! Why not make a pinhole camera out of concrete? I came across this DIY tutorial and was surprised that this unlikely material was being used to make a camera. How wonderful!

How did you come to work with Make It Right? About six years ago I was at a firm in Kansas City called BNIM and we were doing disaster recovery projects. I was working in a little rural Kansas town called Greensburg after a Tornado leveled the town. Make It Right asked BNIM to design one of its early first-round houses for New Orleans so I traveled down there a few times. It became apparent that Make It Right could use a bit of landscape architecture and planning insight as they looked to build a sustainable community in the Lower Ninth Ward. I took a year's sabbatical and left the prairie and moved down to the swamps and had an amazing time with Make It Right. That turned into five-plus years of work with the organization. How did Make It Right come to work in Kansas City? As the Make it Right model began to evolve there was an interest to propagate the expertise and resources developed in New Orleans to other communities. There might not be a natural disaster involved—so many urban cores are faced with economic disasters. We started to look to other communities and develop Make It Right's strategic plan. The stars aligned in Kansas City with a political structure wanting to create this area called the "Green Impact Zone" and looking to focus investment in urban revitalization under the umbrella of sustainable redevelopment.

Can you tell us about the area around the project? How did it fall into decline? What's the make-up of the community now? Our project sits on a street called Troost Avenue. Starting in the late '50s and early '60s with the removal of the street car, suburban sprawl, and other elements, Troost became the de facto racial dividing line in the city—the other side of the tracks literally. The avenue runs over 90 blocks and has a straight shot in Kansas City and whether it was reality or perception, it's been a significant problem to overcome in Kansas City's current history. Quite a few groups have been lobbying hard for ways to change that perception and ways to figure out how investment can occur in that area. A house once block east of Troost is valued at half the price as what that same house one block west of Troost would be valued. Many cities have Troost avenues. Many cities have a racial dividing line—just 95 blocks of them being a straight line is not always the case.

Can you tell us a little about what the "Green Impact Zone" is? We use a phrase called "urban acupuncture." So many times in urban cores, communities never receive enough resources and when they do receive resources it's deployed in a scattered-sites approach. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver developed a vision to do the opposite of that: to define a boundary in an area that needs revitalization and be strategic in that investment until the area becomes sustainable once again. So there was a defined area, 150 square blocks, and it became apparent where strategic investment would occur. It could be new infrastructure projects in the form of streets or sidewalks, or a smart grid development for the infrastructure, or housing, or funding getting routed to the city services in this area. The idea is to really focus investment in an area and see what can happen when everyone gets the resources they need. We were the first project out of the gate and since that moment, over 110 million dollars of investment has been strategically diverted within a half-mile walkable radius of the project site so that it can become a sustainable neighborhood again. That's the core idea: the project becoming a catalytic force in an urban core.

Can you walk us through how you designed the structures? Here at Dwell we're very friendly toward modern buildings but is that something where you received any pushback from the neighborhood? We were fortunate in terms of aesthetics in that we had a historical building and we laid out from the very start if we have to do new construction, our boss is a modernist at heart and we would propose contemporary housing options as opposed to what I'll call "imitation crab meat." We didn't want to try and recreate the beautiful architecture that was completed over 100 years ago because it would always just look fake. That being said, we wanted a contemporary design and looked to the neighborhood for scale, materiality, color palette, and other elements in terms of the architecture and walking the community though the process coupled with the big idea and vision, we didn't get as much resistance as one would have anticipated. But because the process was very transparent it worked out really well. We have this nice contrast of old and new.

The project's core is near a school that was empty for the past 13 years. Is vacancy an issue in the area as well? How did you select the project site? In the neighborhood, Manheim Park, 30 percent of the area for contains vacant lots or dangerous buildings. One block west of Troost it's much much different—maybe five percent vacant if that. We knew that we wanted it to be adjacent to public transportation nodes, we knew that we wanted it to be of a scale of existing buildings or of new construction, and we knew that we wanted to be part of a community that needed a hand up instead of a hand out. And all of that analysis lead to a couple of different sites in the Green Impact Zone. We went into GIS and mapped buildings over 10,000 square feet and transit nodes and then we overlaid vacant properties and the Bancroft just kind of emerged out of that mapping process. And we said, ok, the Bancroft school is one block away from rapid transit, it's one block from mixed-use retail that could be revitalized. It had the proper zoning, it had the proper access, it had a big enough scale building to be a catalyst and to be a visionary from the start. If we're going to walk out and be the first project in the area, we had to make a loud bang.

To make the rotation, the house had to make a three point turn in the street.