“There is an enormous amount of glass here,” laughs Vanbesien—so much so that the design team struggled to find enough wall space to mount the heat pump.
The slats on the window offer solar protection and privacy. “Before the slats were installed, it really felt like you were just living on the street,” says Vanbesien.
The beams were part of the original structure of the home. Ceilings are quite tall—10 feet or higher.
In the primary bathroom, Katz used sliced bricks to cover the walls and floor. "Since it's not being used in a load-bearing capacity, we didn't have to use grout between the bricks," he says.
Fields of native grasses connect the main residence, situated at the top of the slope, to the new structures scattered below. A pergola extends from the post-and-beam structure that was maintained during the remodel of the midcentury home.
Daily Needs by the Belgian studio segers is a modular prototype that’s one part chicken coop, three parts urban farm, as it includes components for a raised vegetable bed, composting bin, and tool shed.
Located on New Zealand’s North Island along the Coromandel Peninsula, this timber-clad shipping container house by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects captures the simplicity of living with nature. An open-plan layout extends the interior toward the surrounding landscape and ocean, while a built-in mechanism reveals a drop-down deck on one side of the unique holiday home.
To achieve a path to homeownership without leaving the city or breaking the bank, three families in the sustainable design industry pooled resources to fashion an arrangement of three solar-powered, net-neutral-energy townhouses in place of a dilapidated 1970s single-family home in Brunswick, Australia.
The late-1960s remodel added a staircase to the interior courtyard to access the second floor. The home’s original intent—to allow each room to spill into the courtyard—remains.