A 22-foot sliding-glass door by Fleetwood opens onto an ipe deck furnished with lounge chairs, a cocktail table, and stools from Room & Board’s Penelope line. The bar is made of concrete and Richlite, a wood-fiber composite used in skateboard ramps.
Sweet’s renovation scheme included recreating the couple’s backyard as a natural extension of their living room.
For more modular inspiration, grab a copy of our prefab issue, on newsstands now.
Photo by Leo Mieles
Photo by Tom Bies
This 191-square-foot cabin near Vancouver and its glass facades "forces you to engage with the bigger landscape," architect Tom Kundig says, but it seals up tight when its owner is away. The unfinished steel cladding slides over the windows, turning it into a protected bunker. Read the full story here.
In realizing their dream to build a country retreat in upstate New York, Sandy Chilewich and Joe Sultan—proprietors of the textiles firm Chilewich|Sultan—eschewed a mountainous view for an understated wooded plot. At 800 square feet, the flat-roofed home is a modest structure for the expansive 10-acre property.
The bed is from Design Within Reach.
Architect Michelle Linden worked with Brothers to create a minimalist house. Inspired by the inward-looking approach of Cistercian abbeys, Linden oriented the U-shaped structure around a courtyard.
The living room is furnished with a Tolomeo Mega floor lamp by Artemide, a Milo Baughman Recliner 74, a Morsø 7648 wood stove, and a Hampton rug by Capel Rugs.
A bridge spans the home’s steep site for street access.
For a Jones house nearby, Buckner took on the restoration, while landscape designer Jay Griffith honored the architecture with understated, low-water landscaping.
At their A. Quincy Jones house in Los Angeles, architects Cory Buckner and Nick Roberts used permeable pavers to help the soil retain moisture.
The sculpture on the wall is by artist Peter Dudek, a friend of the family, and the pendants are by Glashütte Limburg. Baumann made a point to integrate industrial materials throughout, exposing steel beams and setting the floor in concrete.
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.
At night, subtle light fixtures provide soft ambient light. The lights “as discrete as possible, and aimed at the surfaces of the house, defining space and creating the kind of three dimensional modeling that is easy for the eye to interpret,” Snyder says. “It is relaxing, calming, provides plenty of light to live, and as much as possible eliminates visible bright hot spots or illuminated fixtures that call attention to themselves.”
Exterior walls are clad in an sealed, unpainted western red cedar to mirror the colors of the site’s tawny meadows. As the wood ages naturally, it appears as though it emerged organically from the earth.
"I think an architect’s job is to celebrate what people really care about and simplify and streamline the rest.” —Page Goolrick
Burnham and Dolce picked up a petite but deep bathtub, which fits perfectly in the modest master bathroom upstairs.
This sleek kitchen in the renovated Dolce and Burnham Residence hits warm notes with red lacquered cabinetry, cypress woodwork, and a leafy backyard vista.
Dolce sits on a vintage 1950s couch he found at a thrift store in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Dolce and Burnham had the couch and the Donghia armchair recovered in a stain-resistant Sunbrella fabric by Andrew Grossman Upholstery. The Flokati rug was picked up at a thrift store in Florida. Hanging on the wall behind Dolce is a piece of art by British painter Tom Hammick.
The 1967 beach house—which underwent a meticulous renovation by Bates Masi, the original architect’s firm—is listed as an exclusive holiday rental along the coast of Long Island in New York.
When Jennifer and Mattias Segerholt decided to move to Portland after five years in Los Angeles, a shared climate-based trepidation shaped their real estate search.
The metal cladding, inspired by a nearby zinc mine, continues seamlessly onto the house’s roof for a minimalist shed effect. “The drip edge turns to make the wall,” explains architect Brandon Pace, “but changes above the window to accommodate a downspout. Any place where the metal contacts glass, or where you walk underneath, we have an internal gutter.”
When planning regulations limited what could be built in an English forest, PAD Studio devised a prefab structure that can be moved by crane. “The whole building is based around a steel frame, which provides us with the stability to be able to top-lift it easily,” explains designer Ricky Evans.
The BetaBox mobile prototyping lab is outfitted with a 3D printer, a CNC mill, a laser cutter, and other tools for innovating.
The top of the residence is wrapped in simple wire mesh to encourage plant propagation.
Atelier Riri devised a creative way to make living inside a shipping container in Indonesia’s tropical climate both comfortable and economical. The architects layered recycled pine, glass wool, and planter mesh on top of the home to help keep temperatures down.
The home was built by two construction workers and the couple themselves, who were familiarized with the construction process and had backgrounds in industrial engineering. “We did not have blueprints for this design, and created only a 3-D model to guile them along the way,” Saxe says.