428 exteriors

The new, attached ADU is rented out as a passive source of income that is helping Amanda finance the project.

Ceramic pendants by Courtney Duncan and a yellow sculpture by Antonio join a Hay sectional in the living room. Antonio crafted the stained glass panel at left.

True California Indoor/Outdoor Living

The Rodney ADU by architect Webster Wilson gives its retired client the chance to live near her daughter and grandchildren. A Portland State University study found that about one-third of ADUs were used for short-term rentals, and slightly more were used for either long-term rentals or to house a family member. "It’s always been one of the long-range planning goals for the city," says Tyler Mann, a city planner with the City of Portland’s development bureau.

Propel Studio’s Wedge ADU is a luminous respite, with built-in wood cabinetry and a massive skylight. Over the past decade, Portland, Oregon, has seen a wave of ADUs constructed—from detached backyard structures to dedicated basements dwellings and above-garage apartments that are part of an existing house. Portland isn’t the only city committed to ADUs, but in most places, regulations make them difficult. As of last year, there were only four American cities—Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin—that had built more than 1,000 units.

"An ADU facilitates flexibility,

In 1962, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Arthur Witthoefft won the AIA's highest honor for a home he built in the lush woods of Westchester County. Having fended off a developer's wrecking ball, Todd Goddard and Andrew Mandolene went above and beyond to make this manse mint again.

Cove room overhang and wraparound deck

“Simple rectangular volumes with simple details” is how designer Thomas Egidi describes the house he created for architect Carlos Dell’Acqua in Malibu. “I wanted to stress its horizontality,” Dell’Acqua notes. Inside the dwelling, which is entered via a bridge that pierces the 25-foot-high main facade, the view opens up to a panorama of mountains and sea. Ipe flooring is used for the walkway and throughout the interior.

Columbus, Indiana, resident Nick Slabaugh tasked Chicago architect Grant Gibson with creating a low-cost home on a small lot near the city’s downtown. Its design references local architectural landmarks. Gibson says the building’s “low profile with a bulging roof element” recalls Eero Saarinen’s Irwin Union Bank, while the half-buried volume “is similar to Gunnar Birkerts’s Lincoln Elementary School.”

"Radical sustainability

Project Name: ModHaus Website: eastcoastmodern.ca

The clients are a husband and wife with grown children who no longer live at home. The husband is a psychoanalyst, and the wife is a history teacher at a middle school in São Paulo. During construction of the home, very little earthwork was needed, as the residence nestles into the sloped site to preserve the flat part of the site for a garden of native trees and shrubs.

Plants found in the surrounding landscape were used to obscure the lines between designed and natural worlds.

After months of waiting for approvals to build a house in Sintra, Portugal, artist Chris Saunders decided to pivot, commissioning a custom tiny home on wheels from architecture studio Madeiguincho.