A family of cost-conscious Hamburgers converted a kitschy turn-of-the-century villa into a high-design home with a strict budget in place. To unite the quaint masonry of the original villa with the squat, ugly add-on built flush against it, the architects decided to paint the old-fashioned facade graphite gray and then covered the box next door in plain, light-colored larch. Photo by Mark Seelen.

The swimming pool was reshaped and refinished to blur the transition between deck and rocky outcrop. Beyond the pool is the villa’s private beach, framed by lush vegetation.

“We really wanted to capture the ruinous quality of this old building rather than do something overtly new,” says Greg Blee, founding partner at Blee Halligan Architects. Before construction could begin, however, he and Halligan had to patch the remaining walls using stones found in the nearby river. Wherever a wall had collapsed, the designers inserted framing to create windows and doors. For the roof, they turned to the original tiles. “My father’s terrible at throwing things away,” Blee says. “We took the tiles off 30 years ago, as it was too dangerous to have them up there. They’ve been sitting in the fields ever since, and this was our last chance to use them.”

The home’s interior design, featured in Vogue and widely celebrated, was an unusual foray into residential surrealism by Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret.

Originally designed by locally renowned architect Arthur Dallas Stenger, this 1960s home featured an unusual awning that was maintained during a 21st-century upgrade by architects Rick and Cindy Black. The architects partially reconfigured the interior layout, updated the kitchen, and added new doors to the porch, all the while making sure the adjustments to the house honored its midcentury provenance while still avoiding creating a time capsule.

A family in Hamburg, Germany, turned a kitschy turn-of-the-century villa into a high-design home with a few exterior tricks, including sheathing the exterior in one-dimensional, murdered-out black.

This oasis in the French Riviera has hosted Picasso and royalty. #france #mediterranean

Villa Le Trident owes its name to the steep three-pronged piece of land on which it is situated. Before and after the Second World War, the likes of Picasso, Somerset Maugham, and the Windsors all paid a visit to Dierks and his stunning French getaway.

The charred cedar exterior gently basks in the Alaskan sun.

The kitchen features Miele and Bosch appliances surrounded by oak flooring from Bois Ditton; the shelves are walnut.

The structure is characteristic of the town's architecture. The city was rebuilt by modernist architects from the nearby Bordeaux school after it was destroyed during World War II.

Durable, economical, and easy to build, the simple A-frame was once the must-have midcentury vacation home. Today, the classic retreat has been propelled back to popularity, thanks largely to photo-centric platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Read on for 20 charming A-frame homes that caught our eye.

An interior window creates flow between the skylit landing and baby Banks’s room.

An office nook and library can participate in the open plan or disappear behind pocket doors.

In 1962, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Arthur Witthoefft won the AIA's highest honor for a home he built in the lush woods of Westchester County. Having fended off a developer's wrecking ball, Todd Goddard and Andrew Mandolene went above and beyond to make this manse mint again.

Alex Gil and Claudia DeSimio created a duplex in an apartment building where they’d been renting for years in Brooklyn, New York, and set to work gutting the interior and adding a new rooftop addition clad in panels of Cor-Ten steel.

One of the biggest parts of the remodel was removing walls on the ground floor to make space for more of an open plan. The hanging steel Gyrofocus Fireplace by Focus gives the living room a unique character. It's flanked by a Delphi sofa from Erik Jørgensen.

Architect A.D. Stenger designed and developed scores of houses in Austin, Texas, including this one, whose Jetsons-esque facade is rumored to reference the aeronautics classes he took in college.

Glass elements not only allude to the ocean, but also lend a fresh look to some of the rooms. Here, Trend glass mosaic tiles brighten up the bathroom. Axor fixtures from Hansgrohe stand next to a minimalist radiator from Zehnder.

Situated on a natural promontory in Coupeaux, France, the home’s plan and expansive windows open it to the beautiful surroundings outside.

Their creative confections may ruin our diets, but we’re happy to be their taste testers anytime.

Light streams into the bedroom through walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. The windows are triple-glazed, creating a tight, eco-friendly seal.

In this sleek kitchen renovation in San Francisco, the kitchen backsplash is an easy-to-clean glass backsplash that mimics the glossy finish of the surrounding white cabinets. Painters accomplished the high-gloss finish on the cabinets of a kitchen in San Francisco by applying a coat of paint, polishing it with very high-grit sandpaper, repeating the process for each layer, then topping it with three coats of clear varnish. "It’s like an auto body," says builder Jeff King. "It’s incredibly beautiful." The island provides shelving space and storage as well as a second sink, an is topped with pietra grigio marble.

An ample sill made of English elm was built into two front windows to create a gathering spot that is visually connected to the street. Donna Wilson’s lively Ernest pouf in coral Nos Da upholstery for SCP adds extra seating in the living room.

The challenge of renovating an iconic midcentury house is surely a daunting one for any architect, but apply this formula to a Richard Neutra house, and the responsibility rises exponentially. This was the situation for Los Angeles–based architect Peter Grueneisen, founder and principal of Los Angeles–based Nonzero Architecture, who inherited the task of taking on significant updates to an already-altered Neutra—the 1949 Freedman House in Pacific Palisades, California.

In Hamburg, Germany, a cost-conscious couple renovated a tiny home with an adjacent minimart. To transform it into a minimal, modernist home, the architects decided to paint the old-fashioned facade graphite gray and then covered the box next door in plain, light-colored larch.

Saved from demolition, stripped of awkward alterations, and faithfully restored, these rehabbed homes prove how timeless midcentury design can be.

The original home was preserved and renovated. In the front bedroom, a small window was replaced with a large painted-steel window seat, a favorite of the residents' grandchildren.

At the opposite end of the studio, Framework Architecture created a partially enclosed sleeping nook that is spacious enough to fit a full-size bed.

The large patio leads to a newly landscaped back garden. An expansive glass wall promotes seamless indoor-outdoor living. Inexpensive brick pavers were chosen for the rear patio; they offer textural contrast with the steel of the door, brick of the rear facade, and pale gray wood of the interior floors.

“A critical aspect of the project was the incorporation of natural light and ventilation within a broad footprint,” Simpson says. Conventionally private areas, like bedrooms and bathrooms, are therefore reinterpreted with more openness in mind. For instance, this bathroom’s skylights mirror those found throughout the rest of the property. The bathtub, basins, and showerhead were all purchased at the Australian retailer Reece.

The renovation revealed a 30-foot-deep well beneath the bedroom, which the team half-jokingly considered turning into a fish tank. Instead, they opted for a simple bedroom with plenty of built-in storage.

Designer Jeff Sand’s Universal Chairs combine his love for classic French café chairs with an appreciation for “the beautiful metal casings on an old Moto Guzzi.” Sand Studios also designed the dining table and pendant lamp.

Shibata made the 10-person dining table using $130 sawhorse legs from Maruki Wood Products Company topped with a sheet of birch plywood. A hole in the sliding wall fits over the table, enabling it to be used in both the library and the meeting room. malki.jp A movable wall clad in wainscoting on one side slides along tracks in the dining-room ceiling, dividing the room into a meeting space and a library. The Shiro Simple Modern Pendant lights can be easily removed and reattached after moving the wall. vanilladesign.jp

To create uninterrupted views of the sea throughout the interior, the architects implemented sliding glass doors as partitions. This also keeps the interior plan feeling open and airy.

Donut sits on a custom bed made by craftsman Pete Deeble. “Above the bed I hung a vintage Evelyn Ackerman textile discovered on eBay,” says Frank.