In fall, the color of this backyard in Charlottesville, Virginia, changes daily with the foliage. Elizabeth Birdsall marvels how new outdoor spaces on her property, like a patio furnished with upholstered seating from Gloster, make enjoying the woods an easy experience: “It’s like comfortable camping, all the time.”
An outdoor shower in the lower courtyard includes most of the materials that define the project, including Cor-Ten steel posts, horizontal ipe slats and decking, a custom seat and towel shelf set into a natural boulder, and concrete pavers. The yard includes many elements built for play, like a water feature embedded in a concrete wall that is fed by runoff rainwater collected from the breezeway roof.
An outdoor shower is concealed in the side yard and features a weathered
cedar slat enclosure.
Native grasses spill forth from the green roof toward a stairway leading to the main level.
Patio/Pool
With its organic, horizontal silhouette, raw concrete facade, and Bauhaus-leaning interiors, this midcentury nature retreat brings modernity to the mountains.
Set high in a coastal mountain range in Topanga, California, is Saddle Peak—a two-level, four-bedroom holiday rental house with sublime geometry and defined lines.
Cor-ten steel gate
Site fence with Mexican Fence Post cacti
The Phoenix home of designers and builders Sarah Swartz Wessel and Ethan Wessel sits amid desert-friendly trees and plants. The couple bought the property in 1998 and worked on the house for a decade. Juxtaposed with limestone floors, wood-beamed ceilings, and walls of hand-troweled plaster and board-formed concrete, glass is strategically placed throughout the 4,000-square-foot expanse to frame slivers of landscape and sky or open wide to reveal gardens of various sizes, which the couple also designed.
Water recirculates from a bench-level channel into a shallow pool bordered by succulents. Montalvo’s longtime landscape contractor Santiago Vasquez worked with her on the hardscaping.
A 70-square-foot reflecting pool greets visitors as they approach the home’s elemental north entrance.
In central Argentina, the province of La Pampa is dominated by vast, grassy plains whose fertile soil supports myriad farms and ranches. Stretching out in all directions, the flatlands resemble an ocean in its sheer horizontality. When professional polo player Nacho Figueras—a champion of the sport and a longtime Ralph Lauren model—enlisted architect Juan Ignacio Ramos of Estudio Ramos to build a stable for 44 polo horses, the architect was sure to incorporate the region’s meditative flatness into the design.
Garden courtyards adjacent to guest rooms
The motif is expressed in weathered steel for a gate.
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Austin, Texas
Dwell Magazine : November / December 2017
The carport screen is dotted with different-size openings, some louvered.
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Austin, Texas
Dwell Magazine : November / December 2017
Sonoma Cool: living room and main patios. Firepit, outdoor kitchen and dining. Party ready, or a quiet evening. Your call.
A giant indoor/outdoor courtyard landscaped with tropical plants and volcanic sand, in Antwerp, Belgium. (Photo by Tim Van de Velde)
The result is a bright, Portuguese home designed in a clean, formal style, where contemporary interiors exist in harmony with the house’s historical shell.
landscape, pool
All white: the white Carver table being available in various sizes.
south elevation
A stairway leads up to a roof deck, inspired by the historic sleeping porches in the area that take advantage of the cold nights to cool off in the desert.
A 10 foot deep cantilevered roof provides consistent shade pool side in the courtyard
An edgeless pool creates a smooth glass-like effect, reflecting the thickly forested surroundings.
The brutalist council estate to the rear is viewed as a found-object artwork through a new cast-concrete and stark white frame.
Studio
Main Terrace
Main Terrace
Vertical Garden at the Patio
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