Vintage lover Sarah Benson worked with local firm Bright Designlab to gently update her 1925 home in Portland, Oregon. In the kitchen, Moroccan cement tiles featuring a blue Hex Dot pattern by Popham Designs cover the floor.
On Vashon Island, about 20 miles southwest of Seattle, architect Seth Grizzle designed a 440-square-foot multiuse structure for his clients Bill and Ruth True.
Standing-seam copper siding accentuates sections of the structure that provide shear support for the steel moment frame.
The garage is an exercise in “hide and reveal.” The Corian shelf features an outlet in a converted book, a detail that brings delight to a mundane task. “We wanted to make the experience of plugging in a phone or computer joyful,” Grizzle says.
The “tiny but mighty” structure—as Grizzle describes it—packs a wealth of uses into a compact footprint.
Michèle Monory’s Chinon farmhouse is an idyllic getaway from her home basein Paris. After she inherited the property and centuries-old structure from her father, she hired Matali Crasset, who runs a cutting-edge architecture and design firm, to update the living spaces.
On an 18th-century farmstead in rural Sweden, two Copenhagen designers handcraft a summerhouse that seamlessly melds the modern and the traditional.
Built by a crew of three, the home makes a virtue out of being unfussy and straightforward. The north-facing glass wall under the gable, with a triple-glazed facade, doesn't require shading or insulation. The quick-to-build structure—which consists of just structural insulated panels (SIB) made from OSB panels with a foam core, and a concrete floor that retains heat—doesn't include any complicated systems or require much maintenance.
In the existing house, the wood beams were hidden under sheetrock and wallpaper. "I exposed them all, but I didn't let that dictate where the new walls would go," Givone says. "I let the beams fall where they may."