"I wanted that natural beauty to be visible throughout the house and easily accessible,
Seattle firm Wittman Estes designed this compact cabin floating above a meadow on Whidbey Island.
Reclaimed wood covers the ceiling in the main room and bedroom. The large white light fixture was reused from the barn’s previous incarnation, and the sectional is from Interior Define.
Marie Saldivar’s experimental metal-clad dwelling is the perfect place to host family—and proof of concept for her new prefab company.
A young family of five desired a home that would provide an intimate connection with the landscape while accommodating friends and family for extended stays in Washington’s Methow Valley and its seasonal extremes.
A pair of architects infused their 1930 house in Montreuil with sunshine and a soothing palette. “Plants, sun, and coffee—what else does one need,” says architect Olivier Leiken
To pick a site for the buildings, Matt used his drone to scan the site and then Daybreak created a 3D model to test out options for placement.
In Vancouver’s Strathcona district, two side-by-side lots now hold seven residences—thanks to a thoughtful renovation of a pair Edwardian houses and the addition of a laneway, or alley, building by Shape Architecture. The team salvaged as much 120-year-old siding as they could for use on the street-facing facades.
As Nicolás Tovo and Teresa Sarmiento of La Base embraced modular design as part of their architectural practice, they noticed that prospective clients were wary of prefabricated construction. So the duo teamed up with Place, an Argentine prefab builder, to make a proof of concept just outside the Patagonian resort town of Bariloche.
Keep founders Austin and Kotono Watanabe revived a compact home in Minneapolis with a dazzling kitchen, an all-electric upgrade, and a clerestory “scoop.”
Completed in 2018 on a 2.6-acre site in the San Juan Islands, the two-bedroom modular home was installed in a day.
One of four sited in South Los Angeles, a starter home designed by Lehrer Architects and constructed for roughly $200,000 occupies an infill lot provided by the city.
Woodland Cottage is nestled into a wooded and landscaped lot.
“Economy was always at the forefront of all of our decision making due to the high cost of building in California,” explains Kille. But that did not stop her and the design team from selecting strong color choices, like green kitchen cabinets and a bold orange-red front door.
Suzanne and Brooks Kelley at the back of their 1,100-square-foot guest cottage.
Matthew and Holly opened up the foyer and kept the exposed framing in place to speak to the house’s history. The figurine on the newel post is not original to the house, but a vintage replacement found online and rewired by Matthew.
This rugged holiday home in Outer Hebrides, designed by Izat Arundell, was created with stone sourced from its small isle.
Sitting lightly above the eelgrass, this tiny dwelling serves as a port of entry for a family getaway on the Salish Sea.
The couple took advantage of numerous municipal programs when landscaping the backyard. Mandy recently completed a free course through LADWP, who also promotes resources for the SoCal Turf Replacement Program, to become a certified California Native Plant Landscape: “There is an amazing amount of knowledge and resources for transitioning yards with more native/drought-tolerant plants through LADWP and the Theodore Payne Foundation,” says Mandy.
After renting in San Francisco for a decade, DIY couple Molly Fiffer and Jeff Waldman bought 10 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the pair and their friends built a cabin compound complete with sheds, tree decks, a pavilion, a wood-fired hot tub, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower. The cabin is made from locally sourced, rough-sawn redwood, which the couple stained with nontoxic Eco Wood Treatment to give the panels an aged appearance and a dark patina.
The open-plan kitchen, dining area, and living space are arranged in a 16-square-foot volume that features a vaulted ceiling, lending a sense of spaciousness.
The primary bedroom cabin sits in a natural clearing amongst the trees, allowing for a water view and copious sunlight. The boulder-studded coast offers gently sloping paths to the ocean for a quick dip.
In the midst of the pandemic, a family leverages industry connections and modular construction to quickly rebuild a cliffside getaway on a fire-ravaged site in the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve.
The overall home is constructed with larch timber, a British wood, and features a central ridge beam that gives it a butterfly-shaped roof. Shou sugi ban was done on the wood to give it a charred finish.
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