Music man Sam Shah, a former A&R rep with Dave Matthews’s ATO Records, and multimedia designer Anne Suttles, a native Texan whose expertise ranges from floral displays to interiors, met at a party in Austin during SXSW 2004. But rather than music, the pair bonded over a shared appreciation for modern Dutch and Danish architecture. 

In short order, the couple were building a dream home together in Texas’s capital city. With the help of Kevin Alter—a dean of architecture at the University of Texas and founder of Alterstudio, an award-winning local firm—they constructed an ultragreen home out of recycled materials, loaded with eco-amenities. That house was recognized by AIA Austin, won a National Dream Home Award, and was featured in this magazine (see Dwell, October 2011). Inspired by this success, Shah, Suttles, and Alter agreed to reunite for the renovation of a second home, which would serve as an investment property for the couple. Before too long, the pair found a dilapidated 1920s bungalow in Austin’s Travis Heights neighborhood and set to work complementing the existing 1,000-square-foot structure with a cypress-clad 1,100-square-foot addition.

But life rarely goes as planned. Shah and Suttles soon had a child on the way, and a direct offer—no broker—came their way for their beloved dreamhome. "It was good money, yes," Suttles explains. "But it was more than that—with all the stress of being pregnant, I also wanted something that would be more private." In the Travis Heights house, privacy was established, in part, by moving the entryway from the front of the bungalow to the back. A glassed-in box links the two structures: The original bungalow holds the family bedrooms and master bath, while the addition boasts an open-air kitchen and dining combination, Shah’s home office, and access to a landscaped yard and pool. The finished project, for which the architect drew his vision from Marcel Breuer’s binuclear house, feels just right for Shah, Suttles, and their two-year-old daughter, Tesla. 

Sam Shah: I remember the first time I came down for SXSW, in 1999. I fell in love with Austin immediately. Being from New York, like a lot of people in the music industry, I developed this fantasy of Austin. It’s like, "Oh, I can’t wait to get to Austin. Can’t wait."

Anne Suttles: I came to Austin for school—and then for 10 or 12 years was coming and going, coming and going. When we first met, we did the long-distance relationship thing. Around 2006, I gave in and moved to New York, but I brought him back. He had what was considered a super-nice apartment in Manhattan—a thousand square feet, a balcony, and a protected view—on East 49th Street. But I was not appreciative. To me, it was just a box in the sky. So, he said, if he was going to move to Texas, we needed a really badass house with a pool. 

Sam: There was huge significance to me, of being in New York forever and then coming here to build our dream home. I had lived my whole adult life in New York, 17 years. I needed an escape. I felt with the last house—and this house now—my house is one big vacation. The pool is a big part of that, having the outdoor space. I have everything. 

Anne: We never had a space that’s this spread out, even in the last house. 

Sam: The elements of light and all the glass were always important to us and will continue to be important. All the different viewing angles are dependent upon where you’re sitting in the house. 

Anne: I didn’t want to tear it [the original 1927 bungalow] down. I wanted the old and the new. We looked at houses to kind of remodel and add to, but it just didn’t happen. This was exactly what we were looking for, and, I think, to preserve it and share it, there’s a value to doing that the right way. Basically, we wanted this house to be fully updated, in terms of every last pipe and wire and foundation, but also to preserve the parts of it that make old houses special. The hardwood floors had been refinished only once since 1927, which is insane. We’ve closed off a couple things. We shifted everything so they would line up based on the restrictions for setbacks and whatnot and how we wanted to build this addition. The hallway wasn’t there. Originally, the hall was part of a bathroom, part of the kitchen, and part of the dining room. So, some things had to change. It just made more sense to have the private area up front. It helps that the front was raised up. It’s a really beautiful experience, being on the second floor looking into the tree canopy as opposed to being on the ground floor looking out on the street. It’s probably one of the more magical parts of this whole property.

Sam: It’s such an unassuming house from the street. You don’t really get a sense of the configuration, let alone where the front door is located. I’m so grateful for this; everything has its place. 

Anne: There are all these fun moments. The front door was in what is now the bedroom, and now it’s a window. But it’s still taking the exact shape and presence of the front door, so much so that people say, "What the hell? Where’s the front door?"

Sam: I love how we kept the area where the old front door used to be. 

Anne: Our architects, Kevin Alter, Tim Whitehill, Ernesto Cragnolino, and their entire office, are crazy about details, probably to a fault, in that they could make a lot more money if they spent less time doing things so perfectly. There’s not one inch that hasn’t been spelled out, and I love working with someone that cares as much as I do about the details. I’m not in any way, shape, or form a builder. I’m not an architect. But I love creating spaces I would want to live in. I love collaborating with architects. I was thinking if I did live here, how would I want it to be? That’s how the space was designed.

Sam: We’re very much influenced by Scandinavia. My mom is from Denmark, and I’ve spent many, many occasions there. I loved that place. We took a trip in 2010, went over to the Netherlands and Amsterdam. Then, Sweden.

Anne: Collecting a lot of ideas.

Sam: Walking up the driveway, you have this great contrast, and that’s the black-stained addition. It’s so unassuming, you don’t really know what you’re seeing. You don’t really understand what’s going on with this house until you’re inside. 

Anne: You don’t exactly paint a house black and think, with the heat of the sun, that that’s a great idea in terms of cooling. But what’s kind of strange is, it doesn’t affect the heating and cooling of this house. The way this house is oriented, the fact that it’s wood and it’s
a stain, it doesn’t really affect it overall—it’s such an efficient building to begin with.

Make It Yours

Loaded Larder

Featuring reclaimed wood from the original house, a single sliding door covers only half of the kitchen pantry. As the door slides, china and glassware are revealed on one side; the other side holds Anne’s design library and favored heirlooms. The sliding door follows a track installed in the concrete underfloor; the shelves are supported by recessed steel brackets, strong enough to hold the weight of a man—or a baby. An additional full-size pantry is located inside the laundry room, toward the original bungalow.

A Sound Choice

Shah has gone from managing the likes of John Mayer and Ray LaMontagne to running his own boutique music company, General Public Management, to handling artist relations for On-Airstreaming, an online music video platform. Installing a multizone, wireless Sonos sound system throughout the house, he says, "just ties the house together."

Roped In

The stairway chandelier is made from designer Christien Meindertsma’s flax-rope lamps for Thomas Eyck, which feature the same material as those used in Dutch shipping yards. At eight months pregnant, in anticipation of the new baby, Suttles mounted a ladder to arrange the rope, which her stepmother strategically sewed to achieve just the right shape.

Green Screen 

Shah and Suttles, lovers of light, prefer to live without window shades but are still concerned about privacy. Working closely with local landscape master Mark Word, they planted mature bamboo and huisache trees along the property line to create shade and a private area near the pool. 

It’s All Permeable

Doubling the footprint of their home and adding a pool could have placed Shah and Suttles on the wrong side of the city of Austin’s strict impervious cover rules, which set square-footage limits and are intended to protect local water quality. So they installed high-tech Eco-Priora pavestones in their driveway to help capture rainwater runoff. It’s not quite as fancy as the underground storage tank they sought at their first collaboration with Alterstudio, but the strategy allowed them to go green and stick to their design.

In Roanoke Park, a neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, whose streets are lined with sycamore trees and turn-of-the-20th-century Prairie School–style houses, Matthew and Jesse Hufft’s home stands out without subverting. Subtle gestures and forms—a roof that appears to float atop a glass gable, an effortlessly cantilevered 12-foot steel porte cochere—slowly reveal this house to be unlike its neighbors.

"I designed it so if you’re driving 30 miles per hour down the street, you don’t notice that it’s new," says Matthew, an architect. "It fits into the neighborhood, an ode to the modern using technology and steel." 

Hufft conceived the house first and foremost as a home for himself and Jesse; their children, Rock, six, Cash, four, and Clover, two; and their dogs, Coltrane and Blue. But the dwelling also serves as a living showcase for the creative capabilities of Hufft Projects, the design-build firm Hufft founded in New York City in 2005 and later moved to Kansas City. 

The custom-milled Silhouette table in the dining room—produced by the Edwin Blue line, which Hufft started with Clayton Vogel, an industrial designer, in 2010—is just one of many happy marriages of wood and blackened steel warming the interior. On the third floor, a burnt-cedar balcony extends from the office beneath a deep gabled overhang, offering an expansive view of the backyard. Off the living room, glass doors slide open onto a massaranduba hardwood deck with steps leading to a custom steel fire pit and a bamboo-sheltered patio. 

"Three things have changed me as an architect," Hufft says. "The first was building my parents’ house. The second was building our own house, and the third was having kids. It changes perspective in so many ways. We designed 20 homes before this, but I’m a different architect now. I understand the little things. This is a home that will change with us." 

Hufft came upon an empty lot in Roanoke Park in early 2011, discovered it was distressed and could be had for a steal, and quickly seized the opportunity, despite the plot’s 50-foot width. Through a series of space-dividing solutions, the home makes intelligent use of its limited footprint.

To enter the house from the front porch is to be immediately surrounded by examples of the custom craftwork that Hufft and his team produce nearby in a 60,000-square-foot converted warehouse, and to see how the different parts and disciplines fit together like a hidden joint. An elegant screen, made from powder-coated aluminum and white oak, is tucked directly behind the entrance—a vertical plane that contrasts with the horizontal surface of the Silhouette dining table. A bar and a powder room, the latter decorated with textured newsprint and reclaimed wood from a snow fence in Wyoming, provide a visual transition from the front of the house to the kitchen, where an elongated counter stretches across the room. The living room, a cozy space accented with blackened steel, opens to the back deck and patio.  

"We knew we wanted a casual lifestyle and a house that flowed from the inside to the outside," Hufft says. "We’re located near a busy intersection, so it was important to have that divider."

Adaptable, human-centered design takes center stage on the second floor, where the playroom and children’s bedrooms were designed to grow with their occupants. Ornamented with special touches, such as CNC-cut details from Thomas Hart Benton murals on the ceiling, custom casework, and a flock of wooden butterflies, the rooms are playful but convertible. (The playroom, for example, will eventually become a workspace.) Downstairs, in the utilitarian mudroom, wooden cubbies make shoes, boots, mittens, and hats accessible to the children, while pop-open cabinets house bandages, a toolbox, and other essentials.

The third floor—encompassing the master bedroom and bathroom and a closet, all set under skylights, as well as an office and deck facing the street —serves as a refuge for the couple and features more distinctive touches. The bathroom fixtures—including vanities outfitted with circular mirrors embedded with fluorescent lights, and a wood-rimmed aluminum tub—lend an airy, open feel to the space. A custom cantilevered steel shelving unit that snaps together was an innovation born of efforts by the architects and fabricators to save time during construction.

One of the more striking touches is the artwork above the staircase, a framed drop cloth that from a distance resembles a Jackson Pollock painting. When Hufft’s father was growing up, he would help his own father paint, and the drop cloth became an important family memento and story. Hufft held on to it, eventually dividing it into sections and framing pieces for himself, his sister, and his father. 

It’s a design choice that, like much of the artwork hanging in Hufft’s home and the principles at play in his custom creations, is informed by a deep layer of personal experience. In the backyard, a sculpture spells out "TIME," in bold capital letters made from cedar planks. It serves as a daily reminder of the importance of reflection—and that history is often where one finds the best inspiration.

By the time George Bradley, an architect, and Eddie Baba, an attorney, found their house in the peaceful Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, its original charm had long waned. After decades of renovations, the place had become a pink stucco box with pseudo-Brutalist gestures in the form of cantilevered bays punched randomly through the facade. It was a house only an architect could love, but it’s situated on a sloping corner lot between two parks, possessing two of the most valuable amenities in the city: views and parking. 

"The house was cute, and it had this Art Deco feel at one time, but it had been so Frankensteined over the years—up two stairs, down two more—it was just a mess," Baba says. "It wasn’t for the faint of heart," adds Bradley, principal at George Bradley Architecture and Design and an alumnus of the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. "It just felt a little sad. We seized the opportunity to try and make something great here." 

Built in 1941, the house was once a maze of dark rooms on four levels, consisting of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom main residence above, an in-law unit below, two garages, and a concrete bunker meant to serve as a bomb shelter. A nod to the home’s wartime history is found in the new cladding—old redwood planks repurposed from a giant blimp hangar at nearby Moffett Field, a decommissioned military airfield. Outside the house, a pair of blue steel buoys—used during World War II to net the San Francisco Bay and protect it against unwelcome submarines—gains new life as a distinctive garden folly.  

Among the main objectives were to unify the house, maximize the views, and create a destination where the couple could "finally have our friends and family come as often as possible," Baba says. The day before they bought the house, in 2011, Baba, a fastidious record keeper and observer of details, started a blog to document the renovation. A highlight came the following year when, after exhaustive surveys, Bradley’s renderings, site plan, and variance made it through the planning department on the first try. 

The house was reconfigured to accommodate the entrance on the second floor; it stands where the original kitchen was. The couple retained the in-law unit as a rental but shrunk it from two floors to one, creating space in which to carve out an office and a guest bedroom on the bottom floor of the main house. They excavated the ground beneath the apartment and repoured a portion of the foundation to expand the footprint, adding new piers to bear the extra weight. One of the three garages (the former bunker beneath the in-law unit was converted into one in the 1970s) was sacrficed to create a second guest bedroom. The house gained a mere six inches in height and now rises just above the tree canopy, allowing it to blend into its setting despite having increased from its original 2,800 square feet to 3,800. 

The redwood cladding continues inside, becoming a wall of the entrance hall, a double-height space brightened by floor-to-ceiling glass and European white-oak flooring. Above, a Zeppelin chandelier by Marcel Wanders—its name is a coincidental nod to the origin of the redwood—helps temper the tall space.

The new entrance opens into the public areas—the living-dining room on one side, and the family room and kitchen on the other. A central stair leads down to a home office, a den-library, and guest rooms, and up to the master bedroom, reached via a catwalk that also leads to the roof deck, with views to the water, the East Bay, and Mount Tiburon. The rooms are filled with artworks by friends and acquaintances and, says Bradley with a laugh, "a collection of uncomfortable chairs." The star among them is in the living area: a 1966 Safari chair by Danish designer Jens Quistgaard that the couple found at an antiques shop in the city.

Baba and Bradley introduced a sense of continuity by using a variety of locally sourced tiles from Heath Ceramics, with different patterns wrapping the living room fireplace and covering the kitchen and master bathroom. Blending with the kitchen tile is one of the couple’s few bones of contention: Baba’s ceramic Death Star cookie jar. "Now that was a discussion," says Baba. "Luckily it’s gray and it goes with the whole backdrop." 

The kitchen became the home’s hub. Next to a new bay window overlooking the sidewalk, the couple placed an Eero Saarinen table and four Harry Bertoia chairs as a simple breakfast nook. "Every night, we eat at that table, and our neighbors walk by and wave," says Bradley. "We wanted to live in this neighborhood—there’s no reason for us to shut ourselves off from it. We even have conversations with neighbors from the table. Some ask, ‘Did you design the chandelier?’" (They didn’t. It’s Ingo Maurer’s Zettel’z 5.)

All told, the process took three years—to the day—from the moment they received the keys to the house. Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the renovation is that the house is fulfilling its destiny as a respite that the couple can share with their loved ones. "So many friends and family are able to stay here now," says Bradley. "It’s a sharing home."

During the Belle Époque, the resort city of Royan, in southwest France, was a magnet for the high-society set. Blown to smithereens during World War II, the town was rebuilt in the 1950s by a clutch of high-minded architects from the nearby Bordeaux architecture school who were under the spell of Brazilian modernists like Oscar Niemeyer. They brought to the buildings curves, abstract forms, and reinforced concrete, scandalizing the conservative Royannais and alienating longtime visitors. The retooled town quickly sunk into a scruffy postwar obscurity and has only recently reemerged as a modishly offbeat spot to own a beach house. 

That’s where Florence Deau comes in. She has channeled Royan’s midcentury heritage and her own sharp eye for contemporary design into an influential blog, Flodeau, and an in-demand interior design practice. She is now at work transforming one of Royan’s emblematic modernist buildings, the former city planning office, built by the architect Yves Salier in 1952. It is an impressive showcase for any designer: sleek, white, concrete, with a glass curtain facade that curves along with the shape of the street and a vast balcony to take in the seascape. Deau has created a swank little wine bar on the ground floor and, on the top floor, a three-bedroom vacation apartment for a local wine merchant that’s a tribute to the ambience and history of Royan itself. 

"It had to be inspired by the 1950s, it had to be fun—not too crazy—and it had to have a soul," Deau says. The design touches are eclectic, from textiles festooned with tropical patterns to Slim Aarons’s pool party photographs. "We’re not in California," Deau says. "But summertime here can feel a bit like California." 

Deau retained certain original elements in the 1,300-square-foot space, like the minimalist wood doors—made of sapelli, a reddish African wood popular in France in the 1950s—and the linear limestone fireplace. She gutted others, like the linoleum flooring and, to improve circulation, a wall separating the kitchen from the living area. The space was uninhabited for 20 years before she discovered it—dirty, abandoned, with big cracks in the ceiling and, Deau says, "lots of potential!"

The designer kept the walls white or off-white and let the details do the talking. "Light was of the essence," she says. "I wanted to keep it simple and let the rooms be filled with colors through the textiles, the accessories, and the furniture—not from the actual architectural space itself."

Her furniture choices say a lot about the way she works. She loves high design, be it pedigreed vintage items or gallery-quality new furniture, but she’s keenly aware that most of her clients are not millionaires. Her solution: To spend wisely, carefully blending high and low, contemporary and vintage. "You have to vary the prices so you can make your budget," she says. "But I really like that mix—original vintage things with things that are made today." 

In the bathrooms, Deau has paired faucets by the German manufacturer Hansgrohe with simple Ikea ceramic sinks. In the living room, Habitat’s budget-minded Balthasar sofa is grouped with a vintage English coffee table, a Lalique crystal ashtray, and an original Jean Prouvé brass light fixture that Deau discovered in the apartment and meticulously restored. 

To pull off this high-low two-step, Deau sources from far and wide: flea markets, local antiquarians, international design fairs, and boutique shops online— like Baan, for Thai handicrafts, and Galerie Møbler, for vintage Nordic furniture and accessories. She also conducts meticulous research. The only paintings in the apartment are by the Argentina-born French artist Nina Negri, a somewhat underappreciated Surrealist whose work, as Deau discovered, sells at a bargain compared to her male counterparts. 

Deau also dabbles in DIY projects to accent interiors affordably. Beneath a Charlotte Perriand sconce and next to a quilted armchair by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, she has fashioned a little side table by affixing an ordinary Moroccan brass plate to a tripod stand that she found in a local hardware store. "That cost five euros," she says with a rare flash of pride. A Gubi Grasshopper floor lamp—a modernist touchstone by the Swedish designer Greta Grossman, whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art—stands next to it. "That did not cost five euros."

Deau says the designers she covers on her website—from India Mahdavi to Patricia Urquiola—invariably creep into her work. "My taste doesn’t change. But after weeks and months, maybe you’ve seen a piece of furniture or a material or a color that you love. You have your ligne directrice, your guiding line, but you always add and change," she says. "With a project like this, I love to see the before and after. When you put the period at the end, most of the time it looks better than what you imagined."

When Frank Nederhof, a property developer and former real estate agent, discovered a fixer-upper for sale near Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, his professional instincts told him it was an opportunity too good to pass up. "As a refurbishment project, it couldn’t have been better," he says. The house, which dates from the 1880s, hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s, and its last owner, an elderly woman, had lived there for three decades.

The edifice featured high ceilings and a footprint three feet wider than most late-19th-century houses. Nederhof decided to gut the outmoded structure and divide the property into a few apartments to sell and rent, plus a live-work space for himself.

"The area’s fantastic and close to the heart of things," he says. "Plus, my ground-floor apartment has a large private garden—something that’s pretty rare to find in central Amsterdam."

He reconfigured the floor plan of the 1,350-square-foot space and added glass doors to separate his office from his living area. "As a real estate agent, I’m always aware that eventually homes will have to sell," he says. "So I was careful to ensure that the office has access to both the hallway and the bathroom, meaning it’s a very versatile space. I use it for work, but it could be used as another bedroom."

Nederhof added a steel beam to the main room, which encompasses a living area, dining space, and kitchen. The beam’s distressed finish adds textural contrast to the room and supports an 11-foot-tall, 60-foot-long rear extension that projects into the garden.

"I used ultracontemporary materials,"Nederhof says, "rather than taking the traditional wood-and-windows approach." Steel-framed glass doors divide the space while providing views onto the back garden. His approach to interior lighting is equally considered: LED lights surround the perimeter of the dropped ceiling in the open-plan living, dining, and kitchen area, while mirrored glass bounces light around the narrow master bedroom, making the space appear larger.

Furnishings are deliberately neutral to keep the focus on the streamlined architecture as well as on Nederhof’s contemporary art collection, particularly metal works by Antonino Sciortino like the one hanging above the living room sofa. "The pieces of steel just slot together, yet it looks totally three-dimensional. It’s hard to find art that works with large pieces of furniture, but this is perfect." Reinforcing the gallery motif, Nederhof chose Bulthaup kitchen cabinetry for its floating effect.

Though happily ensconced in his abode, Nederhof isn’t content to rest idly. He recently purchased a 1930s garage down the street to transform into more apartments—further adding to his new neighborhood’s design capital. 

While Brooklyn brownstones conjure up memories of their turn-of-the-century roots, they also remain the modern-day face of New York’s coolest boroughs. With brownstone living, however, comes responsibility—many of these classic beauties are in need of renovation and restoration. Below are 10 standout, renovated brownstones that retain their original charm with added contemporary cool.

1. A Beautiful Brownstone Redesigned For Modern Living

This Brooklyn brownstone, which was recently on the market, was treated to a complete renovation by Brooklyn–based architect and designer Elizabeth Roberts. Measuring just under 20 feet wide by 40 feet deep, this property comprises an upper, five-bedroom triplex, a lush rear garden, an enormous storage cellar, and a two-bedroom garden apartment.

2. Designers Renovate Their Brooklyn Brownstone With a Bright Monochromatic Palette

This Brooklyn brownstone has a long and narrow railroad-style layout which is only 12 feet and six inches at its widest—however, what it lacks in square footage, it makes up for in character. The four-story brick structure is around 100 years old and features distinctively historic bones. The homeowners, both architects, were excited to make the place their own and never thought twice about a renovation. 

3. A Brooklyn Brownstone Renovated With a Sartorial Twist

Built around 1910, this Brooklyn brownstone was exactly what Jeff Madalena and Jason Gnewikow were looking for to fulfill their dream of a modern space in an old building.  However, the interiors were in need of work. The creative couple designed everything themselves and hired architect Michael Almon to sign off on the drawings.

4. A 19th-Century Brooklyn Brownstone Is Saved From Utter Disrepair

This elegant, 1890 Park Slope brownstone hit the market following a meticulous restoration and gut renovation by Frances Mildred. When Lindsey Branca and Mike Grosshandler, who have a residential renovation and restoration firm, purchased this historic brownstone in early 2017, the building was in an overall state of disrepair. The gut renovation preserved as many historic details as possible. In addition, the townhouse was reconfigured with a new layout better suited to the busy lifestyles of the modern urban family. 

5. A Brooklyn Brownstone Gets a Vibrant Renovation For $910K

This Brooklyn couple had lost a bid on a home in Sunset Park. They had fallen in love with the renovation, so they took the architect's name and continued their search. When they found what would become their dream home in Crown Heights, they reached out to that architect, Alexandra Barker of BFDO Architects, and had her transform the awkward, dated townhouse into the Brooklyn brownstone of their dreams. Barker employed a modern, seamless approach without sacrificing any original details. 

6. A Traditional Brooklyn Brownstone Receives a Chic Makeover

Design duo James Veal and Christine Stucker, principals of the architecture and design studio Stewart-Schafer, purchased this 1901 Brownstone in 2017 with the intention of giving it a gut renovation and breathe new life into the historic home. The result is a showcase of the couple's unique personal style, accented by midcentury modern and Scandinavian-inspired design elements that blend with the home's traditional bones. 

7. A Budget-Friendly Brownstone Renovation in Brooklyn

Dawn Casale and Dave Crofton of One Girl Cookies enlisted Brooklyn design-build firm MADE, who’d designed their bakery, to renovate their 2,400-square-foot brownstone. A team led by principal Ben Bischoff used salvaged and surplus materials, creating wiggle room in the budget so Casale and Crofton could afford a few splurges on wallpaper and custom finishes.

8. Brooklyn Brownstone With a Gut Renovation

Located on a tree-lined street in Bedford Stuyvesant, this late-1800s, three-story brownstone had been in the same family for decades—and was in desperate need of renovation. Decayed windows, red wall-to-wall carpeting, and layers of caked-on paint were among the offenses. Ad-hoc renovations in the 1980s and ’90s had carved up the kitchen and bathrooms, creating awkward circulations and dated finishes. This gut renovation by Sonya Lee Architect sensitively restored the historic details while introducing contemporary architectural elements and finishes throughout. 

9. A Sustainable Brownstone Transformation in Brooklyn

This Brooklyn brownstone was made more sustainable by "getting rid of the brownstone." Known as Tighthouse, New York City’s first certified Passive House is clad in pale, gray stucco and sculpted with a few historically inspired details. However, the stucco is actually just the outermost layer in a 20-inch-thick, insulated sandwich: the home’s original 19th-century brick is buried deep inside. The cornice is also a lightweight, contemporary replacement in the form of a hollow, fiberglass shell mimicking a wood original.

10. A Vibrant Brooklyn Brownstone

Portland–based studio Jessica Helgerson Interior Design overhauled this Brooklyn brownstone with furnishings and finishes in bold colors and tactile materials. Lead designer Chelsie Lee used colorful furniture and fittings throughout to give the home a fresh sense of contemporary style.

Related Reading: A 19th-Century Schoolhouse in Brooklyn Becomes a Classy Apartment

In order to convert his 1981 colonial into a sun-drenched home, architect Don Kranbuehl started by removing the garage. "The goal was to transform a closed-in, inward-looking colonial box and transform it into an open, transparent volume connected with nature," said Kranbuehl, a principal at the firm Clark Nexsen.

The subtraction of the little-used attached garage made way for a two-story, 1,200-square-foot addition. Kranbuehl then proceeded to conduct a complete renovation of the 2,100-square-foot interior.

The first floor of the addition is now home to a cedar-wrapped work room. Newly opened-up living spaces are lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the garden. Kranbuehl installed a master suite on the second floor of the addition, and then connected it to the other second-floor bedrooms and a staircase via a steel bridge.

Related Reading: A Minimal North Carolina Home Built for a Tech-Forward West Coast Couple 

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Don Kranbuehl 

Builder: Aiello Builders

Structural Engineer: Stewart Engineering

Cabinetry Design and Installation: Lowes

Glass: Brinn Glass, Mary Brinn

Metal: Black Metal Design, Bryan Bolduke

Inspiration often comes from observation. In this case, it came from a lookout tower in Blue Mound State Park, the highest point in southern Wisconsin.

The tower provides sweeping views of softly rolling hills and tight ravines, windswept crops and grasses, and colors that change with the movement of light and shadow. Those vistas inspired Chele Isaac and John Neis to build a house in nearby Blue Mounds that would respect the topography of the state’s "driftless area," a region left largely untouched by glaciers.

The project presented a chance to blend architecture and landscape, to create a living space that was dynamic to view, no matter the vantage point—including from above, says architect Brian Johnsen. "This is a house you don’t just drive up and see," he says. From the observation tower, "there’s almost a fifth dimension to it."

The result is a house that appears to have sprouted from the rich soil. The roof plane peels up from the ground and extends over the lower portion of the house, serving up a carpet of sedums that changes color with each Midwestern season.

The house gradually rises into five interconnected, open levels, with a small observatory at the top offering a 360-degree view of the 40 acres on which it sits. "Look up there," Neis says, pointing to a pair of bald eagles soaring just above a tree line. Wildlife sightings are common here, especially when Isaac and Neis take their border collies, Pippa and Moon Pie, out for walks. "If I have a crazy, hectic day, I can get out here and everything slows down," says Neis, a managing director of a venture capital company.

Neis and Isaac, an artist, spend most of their time in a century-old church in downtown Madison, about 45 minutes to the east. Their primary residence is an eclectic mix of furnishings and art, and includes a studio where Isaac creates multimedia installations.

"Out here, I refer to it as living in a sculpture," Isaac says of Topo House, a name Johnsen and his partner, Sebastian Schmaling, gave the country getaway because of the way it fits into the surrounding topography. "The land is beautiful, the structure is perfectly positioned. The house feels kind of alive. It picks up the subtlety of the land."

The exterior features 190 black anodized aluminum fins—each uniquely shaped—that appear to change color based on light and shadow, playing against the cast-in-place concrete walls. The exterior, like much of the house, is both artful and functional. The fins serve as a sort of rain screen, protecting the building while letting it interact with the wind and sun. The house is outfitted with a closed-loop geothermal system. Its narrow footprint captures cool cross breezes in the summer, limiting the need for air conditioning.

The Topo House was designed with few restrictions. Isaac and Neis wanted it to be a comfortable escape, paying respect to Wisconsin’s architectural heritage, and to the landscape that Neis fell in love with growing up in Milwaukee and Madison. "There’s a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture around here," Isaac says. "We didn’t really want that look but we wanted those principles. We didn’t want something to pop off the ridge, but we also didn’t want a berm home."

After talking with several architects, they were confident that Johnsen Schmaling, a Milwaukee firm, was the best fit for them. "I wanted someone who could talk art with me, but also someone who absolutely was going to take the reins," Isaac says.

The house and its location stand in stark contrast to the urban setting of the old church, a few blocks from the state capitol and near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The couple wanted an open floor plan, and walls of windows and glass doors to easily let the outside in. At the same time, they wanted the 3,500-square-foot house to feel cozy.

Isaac and Neis also wanted rooms that could function in multiple ways. Only one is set up as a bedroom, but two others have sleeper sofas to accommodate guests. Isaac has set up a second studio, and a lower-level room doubles as an office for Neis.

"Interconnectedness—it was very, very important to them," Johnsen says of Isaac and Neis. "They wanted to suck in the outside in so many ways, access it in so many ways, but also to provide shelter from it in so many ways." The house’s multiple levels offer several opportunities for privacy, but the design never turns its back on the vast beauty outside, including views of Blue Mound State Park.

Isaac and Neis took their time furnishing the house, which they began calling a second home in February 2013. "Our other place is very quirky. We have all sorts of things collected over time," Neis says. At the Topo House, the couple are enjoying the spare beauty of the dwelling in their own time as it becomes part of their routine, and of this largely undisturbed landscape.

Laura Sohn and Carlos Anderson gave their eastern Tennessee neighbors nothing to complain about when they, with the help of local firm Sanders Pace Architecture, constructed a modern cabin on their property. The land they bought, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Knoxville, is nestled in a copse of cedar trees, behind a swell, hardly visible from the road. In fact, the 2,500-square-foot house—a modern rendition of a dogtrot, spliced into a Y shape and clad in black metal—attracts far less attention than its nearest neighbor, an abandoned farmhouse said to date from the Civil War. 

Sohn, a sustainability consultant for a major music festival, and Anderson, an attorney-turned-nursing-student, went into the building process armed with little more than a wish list and an appreciation for idiosyncratic architecture. (Sohn’s grandparents designed a modern house in Oregon, in the 1970s, that informed her predilection for spare spaces and indoor-outdoor living.) The couple focused on a few specific asks—tall countertops, an outdoor shower, uncluttered space—and left the siting and material sourcing to Brandon Pace, principal at Sanders Pace Architecture. 

Brandon Pace, architect: The wood cladding is western red cedar, to go with the cedar trees all around the house. It’s a limited palette: wood, concrete, and metal panels, plus the glass windows.

Laura Sohn, resident: You can’t see the house in the summertime, thanks to the trees—a lucky accident. I wanted to be outside of town. My jobs are pretty social, so I needed distance. This is one of the few properties that had enough acreage, and it was priced really well.

Hiring an architect was always a prerequisite for us. We knew that we didn’t want a run-of-the-mill house. When I was growing up, my grandparents had a house that my grandpa helped design, and I always knew I wanted something modern and functional. The two houses don’t look the same, but [theirs is also] on a river, and it has some of the same pylon action.

Pace: Building modern is about function—you can get what you want.

Sohn: We used to live in a house that’s almost 100 years old, and we loved it—it just doesn’t function in the way that we do today. If you’re going to invest in a house, it should be exactly what you want. The in-between is not appealing to me.

Pace: There’s something about hiring an architect and going to look at the site to understand what is good about it and how to take advantage. 

Sohn: I had ideas about tall countertops and lots of windows, the predictable things, but architects bring to the table knowledge of siting the house and pushing the design—which we wanted but didn’t know how to articulate. If we had been with a different architect, it might have looked a lot more like the Narrows, my grandma and grandpa’s house, than a house that is "us."

Pace: You gave us a list of eight bullet points, starting with connection between the spaces and to the outside. 

Sohn: That’s the whole point of living out here, being outside as much as possible. I also didn’t want to be looking at a wall when I was doing the dishes or cooking. We wanted windows but also privacy. And the outdoor shower was numero uno. 

Carlos Anderson, resident: The main thing for me was wanting it to be integrated into the environment. Besides that, clean lines and uncluttered space. 

Sohn: You start doing research and see all these supermodern things that look so cool. But when we started thinking about actually living in a space, we needed a balance between organic and modern. So we leaned toward Scandinavia rather than superslick American-style modern.

Pace: It’s about appropriateness. Most of what we do as architects is "modern," but we also do a lot of renovation work on old houses. 

Anderson: I’d seen a lot of Brandon’s work before, and I didn’t really know what he was going to come back with, but I knew it would be something good. 

Sohn: In terms of building green, the small stuff adds up: windows, insulation, and lighting. One thing I’ve learned from my time at Bonnaroo [Music and Arts Festival] is that if something doesn’t pay off in three to five years, it’s not necessarily the best investment. This house is 50 percent bigger than our old house, and our power bill is 30 percent of what it was! From winter to summer, our power bill stays about the same, with no spikes.

Pace: We developed the program around [a public] Zone A and [a private] Zone B, then presented different options of how the layout could be adjusted according to the budget. I describe it like a funnel: You have a wide top and get more specific as you go. 

Sohn: At first, it was all these linear options, and then the architects said, "We could do a straight line, or we could give you a Y." We could’ve gone straight, but it’s like, What’s the point if you’re not going to push it a little bit? Part of working with someone creative and smart is to come up with something you wouldn’t think of. 

Pace: The advantage of the Y shape is that you have exposures on all three volumes. It starts to kink along the existing contours of the landscape. 

Anderson: One of the reasons I liked the design is that it was something we hadn’t seen before. But, in the more detailed sketches, you could see how high up the house was, transposed with views of the trees onsite. That’s when I was convinced.

A family approached NYC–based Slade Architecture to design a new home in upstate New York that would balance privacy with openness while providing connections to the outdoors. Slade Architecture’s solution fulfills both requests. The home consists of two rectangular volumes stacked on top of each other, each oriented differently and composed of different materials.

The glass upper volume contains the more public functions of the home, including the living, dining, and cooking areas. The lower level houses the more private spaces, including the bedrooms, bathrooms, and a study.

The glass upper level is designed to preserve views of the landscape. It rests delicately with one end atop the lower level and the other end on a natural hill on the site. The lower level’s stone cladding gives it a particular weight and distinction, while weathered steel accents connect the two volumes.

Two volumes are stacked perpendicular to each other, and the top of the lower volume provides space for a green roof and an outdoor terrace accessible directly off the upper floor’s kitchen. Slade Architecture sourced local stone for the lower volume, creating a material connection between the building and the landscape.

Sustainable design was also an important factor in the residence. Each volume is oriented to take advantage of passive thermal strategies based on the home's materiality. The upper floor, with its triple-insulated glazing, is oriented to conserve energy by maximizing solar penetration and heat gain in the winter. In the summer, an overhanging canopy minimizes exposure to direct sunlight.

The lower level features superinsulated walls, and stone flooring that creates a "thermal flywheel" to stabilize the temperature. The home also draws upon geothermal wells to heat and cool the building, and radiant floors are supplemented by a geothermal heatpump-driven forced air system. The homeowners plan to use remote solar cells to provide electricity for the building, allowing the home to be decoupled from the electrical grid.

On the interior, Slade Architecture sought to use materials with low embodied energy. The home features extensive wood millwork—including the paneling in the mudroom and study, the cabinetry in the master bathroom, and the ceiling in the bathroom—sourced from trees located on the farm. 

Slade Architecture's approach unites the two volumes in cohesive, unified way while carrying out the desired functions and preserving sight lines to the landscape. 

Related Reading: A Minimalist Retreat Rises From Old Stone Walls in Hudson Valley

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Slade Architecture

Located on the Imingfjell mountainside in Norway, this minimalist, 785-square-foot cabin features a "hood" in response to the climate and the region’s strict building regulations: cabins in this windblown area must have sectioned windows, standing wood paneling,  gabled roofs set at 22 to 27 degrees, and triple bargeboards. 

Head architect Grethe Løland of the Norwegian studio Arkitektvaerelset found these guidelines to be a source of inspiration. "Limitations are the root of all playful creativity, and in this case, it really became our goal to try to create within the boundaries," says Løland.

Hytte Imingfjell, as the cabin is called, sits 3,690 feet above sea level in an area exposed to avalanche danger—thankfully, through additional site analysis, the firm found that the cabin itself is in the clear.  

"We kept the original idea of a ‘protecting hood’ from the initial project sketches," says Løland. What was once designed as a shield for the retreat is now a bold and contrasting statement. The angled pine paneling, set against the black cabin body, creates a strong geometric form. The ore pine roof protects the "eyes" of the cabin in the front and prevents rain from dribbling down the cabin's "neck," where the main entrance is.

"The building became an understated, iconic sculpture in an area where most of the cabins tend to look alike—and ultimately our clients were really happy with its unique form," concludes Løland. 

Shop the Look

Related Reading: This Norwegian Cabin's Roof Doubles as an Observation Deck

Project Credits: 

Architect of Record: Grethe Løland, Arkitektvaerelset / @arkitektværelset

Construction: Boye og Waage & Co 

Building: Uvdal Snekkerbedrift 

Photo Credits: Marte Garmann 

It’s hard to say whether the stucco-and-vinyl-clad houses popping up in suburbs today will still provide sturdy housing stock in the year 2160, but Boston’s pre–Civil War brownstones suggest it’s possible to stay strong for centuries. Of course, bricks and mortar have a good track record—a fact well known to Susan Battista and Fritz Klaetke, who purchased a South End row house in 2005 after six years living in another nearby.

Built in 1846, the live/work building lies one block off Washington Street, the original causeway leading into Boston. In standard developer style, the buildings in this area were erected together and all look alike, but you’d never denounce this as architectural monoculture. "Washington Street had piano factories and breweries, and you can see those existing buildings now developed into offices and condos," explains Klaetke. Echoing her husband’s passion for their neighborhood, Battista adds, "Our street was where little tailors and button shops and hat stores would have been."

From one cottage industry to another, Battista and Klaetke set up their own businesses in the former storefront on the ground floor. Klaetke runs a three-person graphic design and branding firm, Visual Dialogue, alongside Battista’s mostly solo market-research firm, Topic 101. They both love that the vertical orientation of the four-story, 1,900-square-foot building allows them to separate billable hours and downtime completely–a luxury they didn’t have in their last space, where their seven-year-old daughter, Ava, was wont to doodle on client mockups, and the conference table performed double duty at dinner.

In the new place, each floor’s function is complemented by the external environment. At ground level, the office feels urban, with the city’s sounds and sights at close range. By the time you get to the fourth floor, the din dissipates and the windows frame treetops and the Boston skyline, "almost like a tree house," Battista notes.

These were the raw goods that sold the couple on their new space, but preparing it for occupancy took more work than they’d expected. Upon inspection they discovered drywall piled four layers deep, covering decades of water damage. "You can’t say ‘Time out’ at that point," Klaetke concedes.

The couple enlisted the help of David Stern and Christine Gaspar of architecture firm Stern McCafferty, and planned a renovation that would be low on waste and high on sustainable features. Their first task was to tear out the kitchens on the first and third floors and install one on the second. Most of their demolition waste—fixtures, tiles, cabinets, sinks, even moldings—went to Craigslist foragers or the Boston Building Materials Co-op.

New additions included environmentally responsible choices like Energy Star appliances, insulated windows, and dual-flush toilets. They used white ash for the floors and many of the walls, all sourced from Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative, a highly resourceful enterprise with a smart approach to forest management. Individual landowners with forested acreage join the co-op as member-suppliers, agreeing to become certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and to provide their regular prunings to the co-op for sale as homegrown lumber. Because the harvests are limited and distributed, the wood comes from a combination of species in irregular widths and lengths. Battista and Klaetke embraced the randomness, creating three-dimensional wall surfaces by laying planks of varying dimensions side by side.

With a continuous stairwell running through the four floors, the owners had an opportunity to utilize passive cooling with a whole-house fan installed in the fourth-floor ceiling that sucks hot air up and out, keeping temperatures down in summer. In colder weather, the house stays warm thanks to Icynene spray-foam insulation, which they chose for its nontoxic properties and its ability to fill the cracks and gaps typical of old brick structures. "I did a lot of research," says Klaetke, "and looked at recycled denim and other options, but all of them had issues with water seepage. Icynene wouldn’t compact or mold, and it could totally fill the spaces." Battista concludes, "It’s amazing to live in Boston with no drafts. The house is efficient and the heat bill is reduced."

With no off-gassing from behind the walls, it only made sense to cover the interior surfaces in substances free of noxious fumes or chemicals. Having a child in the house made indoor air quality even more important, so they prioritized low-VOC paints and natural finishes and sealants.

Even with all of these environmental details, Battista and Klaetke agree that the most sustainable aspect of the entire project was the reuse of an existing building in a dense urban center. "Doing that allowed us to do things like get rid of our car, use public transit, and bike," says Klaetke. "It’s really nice to practice what we preach."

There may be any number of architects with a passion for knitting, but David Baker is the first I’ve met. I envy him his scarf, a smaller version of the 40-foot-long, collaboratively knit strip of colors, patterns, and textures he was preparing to wrap around his Christmas tree when we met in his renovated Edwardian in San Francisco last December.

"This is the fifth house I’ve designed for myself," says Baker, sounding not unhopeful that it might also be his last. A hybrid of Japanese simplicity and carefully crafted experiments—such as an almost complete absence of doorknobs—the building is a meeting place for many of Baker’s influences, from Toyo Ito’s house in Tokyo to his father, Bernard Baker, a migrant farmer, sculptor, and self-taught architect who built the rammed-earth passive-solar house in which Baker grew up.

The abundance of thoughtful, customized, and even quirky details might lead one to believe he specializes in single-family dwellings, but in fact, the focus of Baker’s firm is high-density, mixed-use urban housing—some in the kind of neighborhoods that tend to be described as "gritty." Anything but cookie cutter, the environmentally attuned projects win awards for the grace notes—light, gardens, color—that humanize daily life for their occupants, whatever their income levels.

"Gritty" is a moniker that might also be applied to the sunny stretch of the Mission District where Baker makes his home. When he bought the property with his former life partner, designer and artist Jane Martin, its potential was all but buried beneath discarded appliances and a patchwork of illegal additions that took over most of the open space. "There were about 20 people living in this warren of windowless rooms," recalls Baker, "along with assorted pit bulls, cats, and chickens. Whenever someone wanted to expand, they just nailed on some Sheetrock and a new roof."

Built in the years just before the 1906 earthquake, the compound originally contained a ground-floor grocery store and delivery service with living quarters in the back, and an upstairs flat with its own entrance. The side carriageway led to the rear stables. Taking everything down to the studs, Baker and Martin kept the original layout, with Martin transforming the downstairs workspace into her design studio. Now Baker’s painting and sewing studio, it is separated from a small rear apartment by an aluminum door. Where the stables once stood is a wood shop for fabricating casework and architectural models.

"I liked that the building had a history, but that the storefront was boarded up," says Martin. "It freed me to do my own interpretation." Seeking to pull in light and air without sacrificing security, she designed and helped fabricate the new facade of clear and textured glass vitrines. The window boxes provide a platform for an ever-changing installation of art and artifacts—and the occasional bowl of tadpoles—offering pedestrians a reason to stop and engage in a kind of codified voyeurism. Because the windows are 15 inches deep, people can peer in without seeing through to the room. "It’s a much friendlier statement than sticking bars over a window," says Martin.

Air flows in through the row of clerestory windows, "a nod to the original building," and an aluminum Dutch door. Nearly as secure as a bank vault when closed, top or bottom can be left open to the street. Baker similarly replaced the roll-up door to the walkway with an ipe wood gate, a graceful balance of privacy and transparency, and an expression of faith in a transitioning neighborhood. (The spanking new studios of ODC Dance Commons moved in next door.)

Facing the street in the most original part of the house are the two upstairs bedrooms. The kitchen and home office are aligned against one wall of the great room, behind a three-panel system of fiberglass-and-bamboo shoji screens that can be variously arranged according to the occasion and degree of disarray. "Rooms in Japanese houses can be reconfigured just by sliding some doors," says Baker. "As a messy person who likes things orderly, this approach allows me to contain the mess without radically changing myself."

Dotted with seating areas and impromptu assemblages, the space is illuminated from glass doors that lead to a rear deck and a row of windows along the pitch of the roof, which is on the side rather than in the center. "It was one of the advantages of designing in 3-D, because I could see instantly how moving the window solved the problem of where to put the transfer beam—and the asymmetry feels more dynamic." He discovered another benefit when he went on the roof to wash the solar panels, and found that rain falling over the steeper angle had rinsed them clean.

The room is a comfortable, crafted arrangement of furniture designed by Baker and his friends and associates, and pieces he grew up with—such as the Saarinen swivel chairs, Robsjohn-Gibbings chaise, and Swedish rya rug hooked by his mother in the ’60s. Three generations of Baker art—David’s paintings, his father’s sculptures, and work by his eldest daughter, Claire—mingle with work by local artists. And there is a collaborative component in the form of a designated graffiti wall: "Some houseguests
got wildly drunk when I was away, and it seemed a good idea to have a spot to contain artistic energy," he explains, somewhat deadpan.

Baker, who long ago traded in his car for a bicycle, incorporated a number of green approaches, including a thermosiphon system to collect and heat water for his home. Instead of using a pump to circulate the fluid through the solar panels, the heat of the sun powers it; the system also qualifies for a $2,000 federal income-tax credit. A spiral staircase descends from the glass deck to the rain garden, which replaced a concrete pad. Water is directed from the roof to the side planters of bamboo and horsetail and into a permeable filter beneath the pebbles, meeting the LEED water mandate to eliminate runoff. And the back of the house is a crazy quilt of recycled shingling. Arranged in color blocks are remnants of projects by people such as Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, and Steven Holl, fabricated by the A. Zahner Company in Kansas City. "It’s very illustrious scrap!" says Baker. "And at certain times of day they shoot these lovely rays of color onto the garden."

Outside and in, Baker’s personal mark is everywhere—in the custom Plyboo casework and beds, the entryway wall made from iridescent fabric embedded between panes of glass, and the aforementioned lack of doorknobs. "Designing for yourself gives you a rare chance to experiment without driving your clients crazy," he says, explaining the various latch and magnet systems he devised for the doors to the bedrooms, bath, and deck. "I was working on a log cabin in Jackson Hole and got interested in authentic construction, where people had time to whittle their door latches. I liked the notion of doing something more primitive and preindustrial," adds Baker, channeling his inner William Morris. "And there’s a practical advantage, because the doors fold flat and become part of the architecture."

When a modernist gets hold of a century-old house, there’s no telling how it will turn out. Baker’s layering of practical industrialism and personal details—such as the steel entry rail encased in its own colorful wool "cozy" (courtesy of Baker’s friend and knitting teacher, Jessica Cunningham)—is one approach to embracing the present without enshrining or obliterating the past.

When Hunter Hindman and Shelby Carr first saw their future home on Amsterdam’s Brouwersgracht, it had been functioning as an artist’s studio since the 1970s and was chock-full of canvases, paint, and clutter. "It was shabby and stuffed with junk, and it was just sitting on the market as a result, but we could see straight away that it was a really amazing space," says Hindman, a creative director. "The height of the central area, which is two stories tall, gives it a unique feeling. It was totally different from any other apartment we looked at."

"That big hole in the middle of the ceiling totally did it for us," says Carr, a textiles designer, with a laugh. The middle story of the apartment is effectively a catwalk-like gallery, clinging to the walls and framing the massive wooden beams of the high ceiling to great effect. "Coming from America, the sense of history here wowed us," the Texan adds. "We’re just not used to anything this old." Built in 1630 as a warehouse, a function it kept right up until 1969, the building’s interior has changed little over the centuries. It retains its original handmade brick walls and broad oak beams. "The raw, simple quality of the interior really appealed to us," says Hindman. "And best of all, when we moved up to the top floor—which you could reach only by a ladder then—there was yet another great space, with an incredible beamed ceiling complete with an old pulley system."

But age and authenticity inevitably come with a price: The apartment had never been lived in as a home. It had no real kitchen or bathroom, and had hardly been touched since the 1970s. "We weren’t even looking for a place to renovate," says Carr. "We’d lived in a loft in San Francisco, and that was what we wanted to find here in Amsterdam. But we were viewing finished, loft-style apartments, and they were all the same sort of thing: low ceilings and blank white plaster walls. When we saw this place, it just clicked—but because it didn’t fit our idea of a finished apartment, we thought we should look around some more, just to make sure."

After several weeks, the couple returned. The apartment was still on the market. "This time, we jumped right in," says Hindman. "This is the first home we’ve ever bought—so, of course, we had no idea what we were getting into."

It turned out to be a complete renovation that would ultimately "cost twice as much and take three times as long" as the couple envisaged—primarily because, as Carr says, "we just kept realizing there were more and more things to do." Namely rewiring, re-laying the floors, and building a new kitchen and bathrooms, as well as replacing the ladder between the middle and top floors with a spiral staircase. "We didn’t want to do anything too structural," says Hindman. "We knew we had to keep the unique quality of the space." The couple hired a builder, and made the design decisions themselves. The only structural additions are two brick partitions in the top-floor bedroom to create storage and a dressing room. The walls extend across a third of the floor, and articulate the space rather than interrupt it. Downstairs, in the main living area, it was obvious where to begin. "The kitchen was the natural starting point," says Carr, who cooks every day and has discovered an enthusiasm for using seasonal produce. "There was only a basic one here—literally a hot plate." The couple found a small company, Op16, on the nearby Prinsenstraat, where Lucia King, a former Milan fashion student, designs kitchens and her husband custom builds them. Op16 created a teak-and-steel kitchen, complete with a compact white butler’s sink, to meet the couple’s criteria: "We wanted to echo the raw, industrial feel of the building, which the steel certainly does," says
Hindman. "On the other hand, kitchens can feel austere and cold, and we didn’t want that. The curved edge of the steel counter negates that tendency and softens the overall effect." Op16 also made the wooden washstand/dressing table on the top floor, which goes some way to compensating for the extremely small, but perfectly formed, bathroom: "I think we could have made the bathroom bigger," says Hindman. "But then again, living in Amsterdam has taught me a lot about the effective use of space, because it’s such a compact city."

The couple decided to paint the 400-year-old brickwork white themselves, to save money—leaving one wall in the cloakroom unpainted as a reminder of the building’s functional past. While the white paint smoothes out the bigger imperfections in the wall and maximizes light from the windows and the spotlights installed in the north-facing apartment, it still allows the character of the bricks to assert itself. "I think white plaster walls often look museum-like," says Hindman. "But the roughness of the brick gives a warmer effect." Similarly, they considered painting or polishing the 17th-century beams, but finally decided to leave them in their original state. "There are all kinds of markings on the beams," says Hindman. "I’ll notice a number carved there that I haven’t seen before, and I think, What was the story behind that?" The original iron railings surrounding the middle story were also left as found, complete with smudges of paint from the artist who worked there for three and a half decades. "All these human traces tell the story of the apartment," says Carr.

When the couple lived in San Francisco, they collected mid-century design. In Amsterdam, they became frequent visitors to the Frozen Fountain, the city’s leading design store, where they began acquiring modern Dutch furniture. Their apartment combines the two, bridging the half century that separates the pieces. "It is interesting how mid-century-modern American furniture somehow synchronizes with contemporary Dutch furniture," says Hindman. "They seem to share the same simplicity and
functionality." The apartment makes a perfect foil for a sequence of strong, sometimes quirky pieces. The George Nelson daybed, gracing the position of honor in front of the biggest arched window of the middle floor, forms a focal point for guests. "Somehow they always congregate here," says Hindman. It nods to an elegant chest of drawers by Peter Laszlo on the other side of the second story. On the floor below, a deceptively simple wooden dining table and chairs by Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek join two of his Scrap barstools, made from reclaimed wood, at the kitchen counter.

"I wanted to buy everything by Piet Hein Eek," says Carr. "Everything he makes is perfect for this apartment. I’m a fan of simple wood furniture, with a twist; the great thing about Dutch design is its playfulness and humor. " With the white walls, an "injection of color" was essential, adds Hindman. "That’s what appealed to us about the giant patchwork beanbag from the Frozen Fountain, which is made of old blankets that would be hideous individually, but together they work." Carr admits the beanbag has become "the most decadent dog bed in the world," for the couple’s English bull terrier, Rommel (named for the Dutch word for "mess," rather than the Desert Fox).

"Living here is a great experience," says Hindman, "and we’ve really discovered Dutch design, which is not widely found in the U.S., and we’ve come to appreciate the Dutch aesthetic, which is modest and restrained. What’s more, I’ve done the best work of my career so far here." Although they had intended to stay longer, an irresistible new job offer will soon be taking them back to the United States. "Advertising is a transient culture," Hindman adds. "It pays off to move around. We’re sad to have to leave this apartment—we have the emotional attachment to it that we might have to a childhood home—but now we’ve cut our teeth on renovation, we’ll certainly do it again. But we won’t jump right back in—at least, not just yet."

Architect Piers Taylor had always wanted to live off the beaten track. For many years he thought he would end up taking his family from England to Australia—where he once lived and studied—to find a perfect home in the bush, away from everything. But when he came across Moonshine, a former gamekeeper’s cottage tucked away in the woods, four miles outside the city of Bath, he knew a continental shift wouldn’t be necessary. With no direct access from the road, the original stone house with a castellated rooftopis reached via a ten-minute walk along a path through the forest and is graced with sweeping views across the green valley spread out below. "I first went to see the place holding our daughter Lily in a shopping basket when she was just days old," says Piers, who now has two children with his wife Sue, along with his first daughter Imogen. "I got more and more excited as I walked down the path to the house, and when I opened the gate and saw the setting and the views, I knew I wanted to live there immediately. I was affected by it like no other place I have ever been to. Within five minutes I had offered near to the asking price."

The family had been living in an end-of-terrace cottage in a nearby village, which they were fast outgrowing. They were thinking about moving to a quieter area, but needed to be near Bath, where Piers has his practice—Mitchell Taylor Workshop—and also teaches. "He came back from seeing the house and told me he’d put in an offer, which is classic Piers," says Sue. "He had the vision to see the potential of the site. At the time, the path seemed a very long way from the little hamlet where we park our car, but Piers is very good at persuading people, and I soon realized it was definitely the right thing. We moved in during the summer of 2002, and it felt like home very quickly."

Today the house looks rather different: a striking contrast between the original 1780s cottage and a large timber-framed addition whose tin cladding and banks of glass give the effect of a semitransparent shed opening up to the landscape. The extension not only succeeds in creating a working home for a family of five, but compellingly combines the old stone cottage with the contemporary belvedere. With the Taylors now putting the final touches on the house, Moonshine represents a journey of six years since Piers first saw the property.

After two years of tidying and fixing up the place, Piers began to feel the pressure to expand: Imogen, now 17, and Lily, now seven, were sharing one of the two bedrooms when Sue found out she was pregnant with Archie, now three. "We thought we just had to have more bedroom space," says Sue. "We went through lots of different plans and looked at different budgets. We started modestly but then decided that if we were going to build down here then it was going to be challenging in terms of the logistics and access, and so really we should build as much as we could all at once."

Piers decided that a lightweight raised structure would best suit the site and get around the problems of building on unsteady land liable to subsidence, and went to work developing plans for a two-story pavilion overlooking the valley below. The extension would include two more bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, and a large, open-plan living room, dining area, and kitchen on the ground floor.

The family moved out during construction, and, after a month of dealing with difficult contractors, Piers decided to oversee the construction himself. "It was actually incredibly liberating to say I will build my own house," says Piers. "It was also a catalyst to resign from my old job with a larger firm and set up my own practice, partly to build my own house. I thought it was really important to get involved in the construction, to be hands-on, and to see that it was done right."

Although Piers was able to find a local builder and a timber-framing specialist to do most of the work, the house’s relative inaccessibility proved to be the greatest obstacle, as it made transporting materials very difficult. Even his relatively minimal, lightweight design would still require concrete foundations, heavy timbers, and thousands of component parts. The team managed to get a truck up through a neighboring field to lay the foundations and used a crane to help erect the green oak frame, but everything else had to come along the path by wheel-barrow. "The most stressful thing about the whole experience was actually coaxing people down that path," says Piers. "I wouldn’t tell people when we placed orders that we had no proper access because otherwise they just wouldn’t turn up. Getting the oak frame down was the hardest; some sections weigh nearly a ton and had to be brought down on a trolley. It was madness but we managed it."

After six months in exile, the family moved back into their radically reinvented home on time and on budget. Inside, materials are purposefully raw—echoing the barnlike simplicity of the extension—with plywood sections for the walls and floors and bare plaster ceilings. The whole space is bathed in light upstairs and down, with no need for curtains or shutters given the house’s relative isolation. The family has plenty of space and the world is spread out before them, literally, in the valley below.

"It’s very much a simple, direct way of building that responds to the site, weather patterns, orientation, and the desire to spill outside easily," says Piers. "It’s also a version of an antipodean pole house, raised up above the ground, which is quite Australian, but here it’s clad in black tin, which is a reference to the black barns down in the valley. It is very rooted in this landscape and the site. I wanted to do a building that was really about this place."

"The house has become part of our daily rhythm," says Sue. "It does force you to live according to the daylight hours and the seasons much more than being in a house in the city. You are so close to the elements and nature. We can stand in the kitchen and see deer, munkjack, and woodpeckers and hear the owls at night."

Even the path has become a positive element of the Taylors’ day-to-day ritual. "There is something magical for us about that walk—every day, through thick or thin, we make that walk," Piers says. "It feels utterly right to be down in the woods, and [the children] don’t know anything else but Moonshine." Seamlessly blending the vintage with the modern, Moonshine manages to make the unlikely union seem as natural as its surroundings and—to Piers and his family—nearly as impressive.

When Nest Architects was tasked with creating a home for a family of five in Melbourne’s Northcote suburb, it was clear it wouldn’t be "another cold, two-story, glassy timber box." The property is situated on a leafy street, originally populated with a mix of Victorian double-fronted cottages, modern marvels, and California bungalows. In fact, project architect Jacqueline O’Brien explains the property originally boasted a bungalow that was too restricting, forcing the team to start from scratch. 

"The clients approached the new build idea tentatively, not wanting to detract from the charming character of their streetscape," she says. 

For a space that paired nicely with the rest of the neighborhood, the architects drew inspiration from their clients’ childhood homes and favorite vacation spots. Palm Springs minimalism, California-style bungalows, and Australia’s popular Queenslander buildings deftly joined together to create a warm, inviting home. 

A house cannot become a home without its residences, and the Northcote house places family first. Spanning two floors, the 2,900-square-foot home is livable and inviting for a dynamic, evolving family. 

"Key to this home is an intricate floor plan premised on familial relationships," O’Brien says. "Partner to partner, parents to children, siblings to one another, and the family to their community and neighbors." 

The master bedroom on the top floor creates a private oasis for the parents to retreat to after a long day with a generous, private balcony attached. Downstairs lies another private bedroom and two additional spaces with a divider, so the children can have their privacy when they’re teenagers. An outdoor decked corridor hugs the perimeter of the home, becoming a standout feature of the property and a subtle way for the parents to keep an eye on their three kids. 

But while the space draws inspiration from the California coast, the architects brought the project back to Australia with locally sourced materials. 

"The basis of a good house, [which] stands the test of time for us, is a simple palette contingent on the use of good-quality, robust materials," O’Brien says. "When you have that neutrality and softness, the home becomes a backdrop that allows all the other items and furnishings to speak." 

The timber floor is recycled local hardwood Victorian Ash, where the tones vary from butter yellow to soft pink, while the caramel-tinted marble in the kitchen and dining room is local to Queensland. Rounding out the home are pieces from local design stores like Pop and Scott as well as Douglas and Bec. 

Though the house is designed to suit the family’s ever-changing needs, it also welcomes guests with open arms. Many Australian homes focus on the backyard, but the property’s design encourages guests to come in through the back door and experience the home as if they lived there. 

"It doesn’t turn its back to the street, but invites neighbors and friends in," O’Brien shares. "The single point of this home isn’t a showpiece for the clients to retreat and play house. This house is rambling and inviting and welcomes a connection to the street and their backyard equally." 

Shop the Look

More by Nest Architects: An Australian Renovation Gives New Life to Midcentury Style

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Nest Architects / @nestarchi

Builder/General Contractor: TCM Building Group

Structural Engineer: Bradley Moran 

Landscape Design: Phillip Withers Landscape Design

Lighting Design: Nest Architects

Interior Design: Nest Architects 

Cabinetry Design/Installation: Nest Architects and TCM Building Group 

Photography: Tom Blachford 

Styling: Ruby Welsby

When opera singer Ainsley Ryan and Goldman Sachs VP Chris Showalter took over a fixer-upper loft in a former Ex-Lax factory in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, they decided to, quite literally, think outside the box. Forgoing standard wall-building bedroom construction, the couple gave free rein to Adam Hayes and Mark Kroeckel of Openshop|Studio, who devised a fluid, multifaceted freestanding structure sheathed in oriented strand board (OSB). The configuration preserves the loft’s open space and ample light while forming a master sleeping cove, bathroom, walk-in closet, and cavelike bedroom for the couple’s other big project, daughter Tatum.

When we bought this place, we could not have moved in. It was weird. It was bizarre. It was filthy—–the carpets, the walls, everything. They had lofted the bedroom, but we’re really tall—–I’m six feet, Chris is six-three—–so for us, that just didn’t work. Underneath, they had what looked almost like a garage—–an enormous crawl space packed full of junk. The two huge columns were drywalled and part of a closet, so we didn’t even know they were here. The layout was just absolutely insane. This probably appears insane too, but basically, we knew we had to gut it.

We hired friends of ours, Adam Hayes and Mark Kroeckel, to help us design it. We knew that this might be the last apartment we’d live in in New York, and came to the conclusion that we might as well go crazy. We gave them carte blanche. The only thing I cared about was the grand piano. So they basically had a big rectangle to work with.

This is a south-facing apartment, so the sun that comes in is so bright. It could be 20 degrees outside, but in here, you feel like you’re at the beach. We wanted the light and the air to continue to circulate around the apartment and not build walls blocking off large portions of the space. We also knew we didn’t care for a big bedroom. That’s why the designers came up with this structure: It bends, it has skylights, and it’s open. The bedroom is tucked beneath a fold, Tatum’s room and the bathroom are enclosed, and  the closet is formed between the back wall of the apartment and an outer wall of the structure. The designers called it a form or volume in their plans, but our friends call it the hive, the pod, or the amoeba. It sort of looked like a dinosaur skeleton.

When you talk to people who’ve renovated in New York, you hear horror stories about how it takes twice as long and costs twice as much. And we started the whole process before I was pregnant. I had to call the architects and say, "Uh, so, we actually need a baby’s room now." It’s funny, they were the first people I told I was pregnant!

The renovations started in September 2006. Because the apartment is on the second floor, passersby could see inside; people were running out onto the middle of the street, saying, "What is going on up there?"

Living here took a little bit of getting used to, because you’re just so accustomed to having walls and four corners. You feel almost like you’ve been institutionalized. Of course, I had a newborn, so I was out of my mind to begin with.

The baby loves the structure, though. She loves running around and playing hide-and-seek in it. Tatum doesn’t know it’s weird. She just thinks everyone’s bedroom looks like that. The built-in bench in her room doubles as a storage bin for her stuff, which is greatly needed. She basically learned to walk by moving alongside the bench. The Flor tiles make the surfaces more baby-friendly. During the day, the light streaming in through the skylight turns a corner and it gets darker, which is great for naps. She won’t sleep through the night when we’re all out of town.

For our bedroom, we wanted a simple sleeping nook. This is where we really used material to soften up the structure. The felt makes it feel cozy, and the light pours in from the windows each morning and makes it nice and warm. Even the pendant lamps are rubber, in case you smack your head on them. At first I felt like I was waking up in a spaceship, but I got used to it. Everyone that goes in there is like, "Oh my god, that’s awesome!" Then they want us to put felt on the rest of it.

A lot of people are shocked by the material—–definitely more so than the shape. They can’t get over the wood. If it were a different material, I think people would have a different response. But we had a budget—–we couldn’t build it out of marble! Also, this is a very low-toxicity, low-emissions OSB. That was very important to me. I really wanted a safe, green material.

Chris was worried that the design and the theme of exposed wood and concrete would make it feel hard. But the bedroom and the roll-out bed area, which is padded so it can double as a place to curl up and watch a movie, really soften things up. Having a big, explosively colorful, comfortable rug to mitigate the industrial feel of the space is also important.

The open kitchen is awesome. It’s critical for me with a baby to be able to watch her play while I’m cooking. It’s great for entertaining; the custom Corian table that wraps around the column is perfect for dinner parties.

The shelving and the closet use identical custom ironwork so you can take brackets out, put poles up—–whatever you want. We’ve rearranged the shelves several times already; we took them off of the lower level because Tatum was starting to walk.

We love it, though. Today, I had no lights on, and the hallway inside the structure was lit up by the sun. The air circulates really well and it always feels fresh in here. Except for when I’m burning spanakopita.

If there were a theme song for architect Christi Azevedo’s rehabilitation of the crumbling 1885 abode she purchased in San Francisco’s Mission District, it would have to be "Love the One You’re With." Instead of an extreme makeover, the self-described modernist undertook a thoughtful refurbishment—preserving trim, retaining the layout, making furniture from framing lumber excavated from the site, and fabricating new elements as needed. Musing on the Victorian hybrid that she shares with her partner, Katherine Catlos, Azevedo notes, "I think the world will look more and more like Blade Runner, where you have an old Chevy Nova as well as some crazy thing flying through the air. There’s room for both."

When I first spotted this place, it looked like a haunted house—dark, broken windows, graffiti covering the walls. But it had a really good form. It’s not Queen Anne or Italianate but an Eastlake/Stick style that’s really boxy and straightforward. In its own way, it’s actually kind of modern.It’s funny, because I was looking for a warehouse with room for my metal shop and I ended up with a classic Victorian with seven rooms and an outbuilding. There are almost 1,600 square feet upstairs, and everywhere you look there’s a door to another room. Everyone said, "You should make this room bigger and tear these walls out," but I resisted. I even left some details—like a stamped-tin flue cover dating from when the rooms were heated by potbellied stoves—as a reminder of how the house used to work. I felt kind of reverent.

After living in a warehouse, I actually found that this collection of little rooms had much more potential than one big space. We’re still playing with how to use them—right now they are offices, boudoirs, and a yoga room. But it’s good to have big and small together, so I opened up the back. I built the kitchen into the porch, and the old kitchen became the dining room. It was a little sad, because every­body fills in these old porches, and so this 19th-century laundry washing and hanging tradition is forgotten, but the new steel-and-glass window wall keeps a gesture of that openness. The integral stainless steel counter and sink speaks to my crush on old kitchens. Time was, you had a sink, a stove, and a worktable—very basic—so this is like a modern version of that.

We spend most of our evenings in the tiniest room, right off the kitchen. It was probably the maid’s room, and now it’s the media room because, well, it’s closest to the fridge. It’s the room everybody thought should be opened up, because it’s only eight by ten. But the ceiling is 11 feet high, and the proportions work, so it’s cozy rather than cramped. I made the couch and the daybed, which I based on the Case Study daybed structure. I asked my neighbor, who’s an auto upholsterer, where to get those springy things, and he told me about this upholstery company that’s been in business since the 1850s, making buggy whips and stuff. I like how old and new come together in the architecture and the furniture. The fireplace in my office was covered in layers of white, green, and tar-black paint that I stripped. It’s enormously detailed, and the tile is mostly original. I looked at it and thought, Hmm, I don’t know…but what the heck.

The outbuilding was added in 1916. A friend found an old photo of it on Flickr with this very faint sign, "San Francisco New French Laundry." The old brick boiler room surrounds our hot tub, and the wooden part is my fabrication shop. I love how history is embedded everywhere. There are rub marks on the concrete floor and doors from the laundry carts. The ground floor of the house used to be the tailor shop; I found a bunch of little rats’ nests down there made of string and buttons. Now I rent it out, so we’re kind of preserving the old live/work paradigm of the property.

During the renovation I became addicted to those gorgeous Sanborn fire-insurance maps that have outlines of all the buildings. Our house shows up in 1887, and it used to be the big kid on the block. Later, you can see the neighborhood giving way to more two- and three-story houses. After the 1906 earthquake, the fire somehow jumped this house; it was unscathed.

Sitting in the square bay window in my office, I like to look out over all the hubbub happening in the street. It’s definitely industrial; it took a little convincing to get Katherine to move here (I gave her the best room to placate her), but there’s always someone I can borrow a tool from, or a place to pick up some plumbing pipe. Living here has made me more interested in history and makes me think of Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. He doesn’t propose a style, but looks at how spaces and people interact. I feel like a case study from that book.

When you build a house from the ground up, as I’m doing in Oakland for a client, you don’t mimic history; you let the technology guide you. But there’s a lot to be learned by living in these older houses and experiencing how the rooms are being used 100 years later. It’s like Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn—we’re always learning from the past.

"Today’s action will bring about a healthier city and a greener planet," Eric Garcetti, president of the Los Angeles City Council, declared in mid-February. He was celebrating the progress of a green building ordinance that he had been steering through the council. The ordinance will require projects larger than 50,000 square feet to be LEED-certified, and it will incorporate "sustainability guidelines" into the city’s building codes. With that ordinance’s passage, a fellow councilperson suggested, Los Angeles would take "another great step toward becoming a greener, more sustainable city."

Garcetti, 37, is an engaging and smart young legislator who, together with his equally dynamic partner, Amy Elaine Wakeland, 38, has been active in progressive politics since they met as Rhodes scholars at Oxford University in 1993. Garcetti is currently the state co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, while Wakeland is hard at work fighting for the expansion of public parks in low-income neighborhoods.

But if their first love is political action, they also share an interest in design, and they’ve spent several years adapting and landscaping a mid-century home in the neighborhood of Echo Park, near downtown Los Angeles.

As I drive to their house to pay a visit, I ponder what to expect. Do Garcetti and Wakeland practice what they preach? Is Garcetti’s home life as green as the legislation he promotes?

Their home is perched on a very steep hill, overlooking the small houses and apartment buildings that cling to the slopes of this ethnically—and economically—mixed neighborhood. There, parked in the driveway, is a silver Toyota RAV4-EV. Garcetti has been driving an electric car since GM released its leasable EV1 in 1997; in fact, he was featured in the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" as one of those fighting to stop GM from killing his car.

Garcetti and Wakeland’s house was designed in the early 1950s by architect Daniel Dworsky, the founder of a large corporate firm whose projects include the Bradley International Terminal at LAX.

It doesn’t scream "classic high modern" in the sense of a Neutra or an Ellwood; rather, it’s a simple post-and-beam building in olive-gray stucco with large metal-framed windows. It evokes the pleasantly imperfect quality of a lived-in house that has weathered multiple owners and add-ons.

When Garcetti and Wakeland bought the house, they wanted to emphasize its modernist characteristics while bringing it into the next century. With the help of architect Elissa Scrafano, the structure is now a study in openness, simplicity, and light, with the bonus features of sustainable materials and greater energy efficiency.

Right from the start, says Scrafano, "Eric and Amy were looking at sustainability. They are both modernists so it made the project that much more  interesting." The concept, she explains, "was to weave the bad parts of the house with the good parts and to capture more light and views. We took down walls and eliminated a bathroom where the dining table now sits, and we cut large holes in the back of the house to make the connection to landscape and nature beyond. I think the biggest thing was the views and connections from the interior to the exterior. To achieve this, some of the work we did was additive and some was subtractive."

In adapting the house, the couple and their architect often came up against building codes that impinged on the design. For example, the windows upstairs could not be as large and low as the originals downstairs, and when they added to the second floor they had to cut back the rocky hill to create a safe distance. As someone in the business of creating rules, Garcetti found the process quite educational: "It helped me see what my constituents go through when they do remodels and come face-to-face with ever-evolving building codes. It made me appreciate that laws have to be both well intentioned and user-friendly."

The main objective with the renovation was to make the house as energy efficient and nontoxic as possible. The house does have air-conditioning, but they maximized cross ventilation by installing windows on all sides. They installed a tankless water heater and solar paneling on the flat roof, which provides 50 percent of their energy; they laid bamboo flooring on the second level, built closet doors of recycled plastic, and constructed decks out of sustainable wood treated with nontoxic sealant. No-VOC Yolo paints were used throughout the house. And, at around 2,000 square feet, they kept the whole project a relatively modest size.

Not unlike the home itself, the furnishings embody livability rather than perfection. Several of the pieces are hand-me-downs from Garcetti’s parents. (Gil Garcetti was the district attorney for the City of Los Angeles and now photographs art, architecture, and cultural subjects; Sukey Roth Garcetti headed up a local charitable foundation.) The family grew up in Encino in the San Fernando Valley, in a thoroughly contemporary home. "It was nice growing up with modernist parents," says Garcetti, pointing out the metal dining chairs with vinyl padding which he used every day as a child.

While the remodel was in process, Wakeland and Garcetti tilled the land. In addition to their own yard, the couple acquired two steep, unbuildable adjoining lots. With the help of Sean Femrite Environmental Design Studio, they are transforming this 19,000-square-foot yard into a full-blown productive garden. Wakeland, who was schooled in the arts of horticulture, canning, and bottling as a child in her native Indiana, has also built a "worm factory" in the yard: a half-food, half-paper tub in which worms merrily turn trash into rich compost. She propels herself by rope up the 35-to-45-degree hill and points out the fruit trees, vegetables, and 22 perennial herbs that they harvest for their own table and for friends. They even trade fruits and vegetables with a fellow councilperson, Bill Rosendahl, for eggs from his chicken coop. "Last time I sent him a basket," Wakeland recalls, "he announced it on the TV broadcast of a city council meeting."

For Scrafano, working with the couple was highly rewarding: "Both Eric and Amy had an incredibly rational, clear vision and never strayed from the design concept from day one. They are incredibly committed to what they do and that was reflected in the design process."

Everything about the house suggests that Garcetti and Wakeland more than practice what they preach; they are trying to channel into political action a philosophy of life that they have been honing for many years. Yet, the two are living an essentially suburban life, albeit as earth-friendly a one as possible. I ask them whether it wouldn’t be even more sustainable to reside in a multifamily dwelling in Garcetti’s district or downtown and walk or bus to City Hall. Both Garcetti and Wakeland say this is an issue with which they have grappled.

"I would say that the truth is that everyone living in North America could be more green," says Wakeland, "and it’s important that when people start doing this work they focus on what they can accomplish without getting too guilty. People need to feel like they are making positive contributions moving forward." Pointing out that a public transit line is just three blocks from their house, Garcetti concludes: "I think L.A. offers a way to live with nature while living green so it doesn’t have to be either-or. I think we can live in harmony with both the city and the topography and lifestyle that has always defined Los Angeles." 

A few miles outside Boulder, Colorado, in the tiny town of Nederland, it’s still common to hear bluegrass wafting down streets that have changed little since their settlement in the silver-mining era. It’s a place where building a house can be an all-hands community effort, using materials supplied by the surrounding land, and the imperfections of a human touch are a value-added proposition.

Rob Pyatt and Heather Kahn met while working on such a project in 2000. Kahn, an artist, hired Pyatt, a builder with an art degree, when she was managing the construction of a straw-bale house in Nederland. The home was designed using traditional straw-building techniques: stacking thick bales into walls, then coating them in stucco. The result was smooth and earthy, with soft corners and hand-molded window frames. "It turned out well," says Kahn, "all things considered. You have to go into it knowing that it’s a different type of work."

Over the course of the project, Pyatt and Kahn began dating, and the job culminated with their engagement, which Pyatt proclaims was the best thing to emerge from the endeavor. They combined two households into Kahn’s 900-square-foot bungalow in Boulder and were married in 2002. Soon after, Pyatt entered the University of Colorado, completing an undergraduate degree in environmental design, followed by a master’s in architecture.

Compact living suited the couple—until the prospect of starting a family began to make things look smaller. With a limited budget and Boulder housing prices booming, a self-designed addition seemed like the only realistic option. But a repeat performance of the folksy Nederland project was not in the cards. Though just 15 miles away, it’s a cultural leap from sleepy "Ned" to the lively neighborhoods of Boulder, where an infusion of tech start-up chic gives the town a semi-urban flavor.

The house would be decidedly modern, they agreed. But they weren’t starting from scratch. Their tiny 1940s cottage hadn’t seen significant updates in its six decades, and the home’s age, combined with the duo’s strong commitment to executing the project sustainably, meant preserving as much of the existing structure as possible. "The foundation is such that we really couldn’t go up without doing work down there, so we just adapted what we had," Pyatt explains.

On their larger-than-average lot, they had ample space to construct a sizable wing, but they chose instead to preserve the backyard and build a compact addition that would take full advantage of indoor/outdoor living in a region renowned for its nearly year-round sun. Inspired by traditional Southwestern courtyard houses, Pyatt designed a simple box that would attach to the original entryway, creating a partially enclosed concrete patio and outdoor dining area at the rear of the house.

With their first child on the way, the clock was ticking, but Pyatt isn’t one to cut corners. As he neared the end of architecture school, instead of trying to juggle his home-building project with coursework, he wised up and turned the former into the latter. Encouraged by his advisor, Rick Sommerfeld, Pyatt created an independent study that would earn him school credit for designing and building his family’s home. This afforded him the flexibility to research and experiment with materials and systems in order to push the envelope on sustainability.

Construction began in 2005, just after Pyatt finished advising a team of designers from the University of Colorado on its submission to the Solar Decathlon, the U.S. Department of Energy’s biennial architecture contest held on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The team took first place, winning with a design that focused on modularity and natural materials, a perfect prelude to Pyatt’s own project in progress. The small Decathlon house was made with specialized bio-based lightweight structural insulated panels (BIO-SIPS), invented by one of the team’s supervising professors, architect Julee Herdt. Working with the prefab panels was an inspiring shift from Pyatt’s early straw-bale projects toward more industrial uses of recycled agricultural by-products. He and the team further embraced the potential of farm waste by carting their creation to and from DC on trucks fueled by biodiesel.

Back in Boulder, Pyatt merged his love of straw construction with his interest in prefab systems by going to the compressed straw–panel manufacturer Agriboard Industries. "They didn’t have a thick enough panel for Colorado, so I worked with the engineers to make a prototype," he recounts. "It’s 12 inches thick, with a higher R-value (resistance
to heat)—more similar to straw bale. Our working model is an R-38, whereas the more popular six-inch is much lower." The efficiency of the envelope  was then reinforced with recycled-cotton insulation from Bonded Logic Inc., a company known for its innovative reappropriation of discarded denim. Pyatt replaced the windows throughout the house with superinsulated panes from Alpen Energy Group, a company that produces a low-emissivity coated glass called Heat Mirror, which reflects heat back toward its source—away from the house in warm weather and into the heated interior during winter months. Alpen Energy’s glazings are customized according to the orientation of each window, notes Pyatt, "so if you have a south-facing wall, you’d want passive solar glass that lets in radiation, while western-facing glass blocks the radiation."

The more immediate needs of the couple’s kids played a big part in considering indoor air quality. They chose low- or no-formaldehyde plywood, nontoxic adhesives, and zero-VOC paint, and staunchly avoided materials that are known to off-gas or contain toxic compounds, including carpeting on which the kids would inevitably roll around and kick up particulates. "In every instance where we had to make a decision on a product," says Pyatt, "we would evaluate that product and look at alternatives and figure out how it would work from a conventional construction standpoint and how it would look for a new way of construction with prefab."

On a street dominated by conventional residences, the family’s deviations from the norm attracted attention, not all of it supportive. The corrugated-metal cladding that covers a portion of the exterior stands out against the warmer wood-plank facade and in the beginning stirred some rumblings among the neighbors. "Nobody raised hell, but through the grapevine we heard that people were saying, ‘What on earth are they doing?’" Kahn recalls. "But over time it seems like the reaction is really good. And as soon as somebody walks in, they’re just in love."

Nearly doubled in area, the 1,700-square-foot home still uses space efficiently and conservatively, accommodating Pyatt’s office and Kahn’s studio, in addition to three bedrooms and two bathrooms. There’s even room for Pyatt’s brother, Kirk, who helped build the house and moved in afterwards. "This little house feels big and open," Kahn muses. "I wanted to be able to be in the kitchen and hear what my kids were doing, or see them outside, and just have it feel very functional and natural and cozy."

As their two young sons get bigger, there will surely be times when cozy verges on crowded, but with luck (and a yard big enough to burn off excess energy), the boys will take as much pleasure growing up in this house as their father did in building it. "It was definitely a labor of love, and as an artist turned builder the creative aspect of design-build was a joy," says Pyatt. "Some of my best memories will be of having a beer with my brother after a successful day building the house together."