Fold-up chess table.
View from lower floor toward living room.
Panels folded back up.
Fold-down dining table.
Connected to the main house by a narrow bridge, a three-story cedar tower with a sauna at its base recalls a tree house. The screened-in second level includes a table and chairs for enjoying an outdoor meal, while a swing on the tower’s top level provides a perch to take in the surrounding birch trees.
Two hours north of New York City, an unusual barn emerges from a hill just off a country road. Its black siding and bright-red window frames hint at the imaginative playground inside. This space, with its rope-railed catwalk and indoor tent, is just one element of the multifaceted getaway architecture and design firm BarlisWedlick Architects designed for fund manager Ian Hague.
A rooftop oasis furthers the outdoor connection. It's planted with red fescue at the client's request for a wild and unmaintained look and an experience akin to "walking through a field."
Even a small patio can have a monumental effect. A green wall in this kitchen patio also brings views to the higher parts of the slender town house, located in the West Village in New York. The counter and floor, clad in gray honed slate, and the teak-clad walls and bench complement the greenery.
Inspired by the client’s affinity for Donald Judd’s metal boxes and her request for a surface that could handle heavy use and abuse, Lubrano and Ciavarra wrapped the kitchen island, the counters, and the backsplash behind the Viking range and Miele hood in brushed stainless steel. The integrated shelving accommodates the resident’s expansive cookbook and tableware collection. The kitchen’s HVAC system is located in the cellar and blows through vents set into the concrete floor.
Since the room is at the windowless middle of the house, it borrows light from the kitchen, which, despite its pristine Bulthaup cabinetry and hardware, is the laid-back heart of the house. Chong took advantage of the one-and-a-half-height ceiling to establish some well-hidden storage cabinets.
Edgley Design designed the beds and headboards in the bedrooms. Just one of the several bespoke details that the firm included in the home.
Max De Pree House
Designed in 1954, the Zeeland, Michigan home of Max De Pree—son of Herman Miller founder D.J. De Pree, and later the CEO—melded local style and history with Scandinavian cool, including a sleek vertical shape and a cedar exterior.
Photo credit: chicagogeek, via Creative Commons
The Scyon Axon cladding of this gabled Melbourne addition gleams at midday. Designer Dan Gayfer punctuated the facade with sliding glass doors and a row of windows to fill the narrow home with sunlight.
House Bäumle
The Module Grid House
The outdoor living room serves as both a counterpoint and extension of the interior, with amenities that include a Gandia Blasco dining table and bench, a Lynx grill, and a custom concrete fire pit designed by Kathleen Ferguson; it sits atop a bed of crushed white rock. A built-in bench runs along the length of the courtyard.
At the opposite end of the studio, Framework Architecture created a partially enclosed sleeping nook that is spacious enough to fit a full-size bed.
Two bedrooms separated by sliding doors occupy the partial second story.
A bedroom with a view of Manhattan in the Wythe Hotel.
The entire house is painted in one color: Sherwin Williams' Ibis White.
In the master bedroom, a small, cramped closet was replaced with a wardrobe that is partially obscured by a slatted wooden screen that was built by Metalworks & Design Studio of Seattle. "The idea was you see through it, so in a sense it doesn't feel like a small space," Smith says.
The hideaway grows darker as residents move through the space toward the bedroom. The only light in the sleeping space enters indirectly from the nearby glass façade, as well as from a small ventilation window in the northern corner.
The bedroom’s vertical, floor-to-ceiling window lets occupants admire the graceful trees outside. A Mini Tolomeo lamp by Artemide sits on the bedside table.
The snug attic in this former fisherman’s cottage in Copenhagen contains the homeowner’s platform bed, custom-designed by Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen to maximize storage and fit the unusual space.
For the spatially challenged, think vertically: lofted beds make every inch count.
To free up space, beds, shelves, and a sofa appear to be built into the wall. To accommodate the gentle curve of the "unit," the architects selected birch plywood. A large window is opposite of the beds.
Open to the valley, the home lets the Shopes fully experience the seasons, even the sound of the Hudson River’s ice cracking in winter.
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