Home Ideas
Completed in just six weeks by Australian practice Archiblox, this modest prefab home is perched atop cliffs with prime views of Avalon Beach, just a short drive away from Sydney. Oriented east to west to maximize cross ventilation, the house is clad in marine-grade Colorbond Ultra steel and Queensland blue gum to protect against the elements.
Inspired by the small scale of Japanese residences—in particular, Makoto Masuzawa’s 1952 Minimum House—architect Andrew Simpson designed his own economical 538-square-foot home set into a wooded site in Island Bay, a coastal suburb outside Wellington, New Zealand.
The great room in the 2,800-square-foot house that architect Drew Lang designed for his family in the Hudson Woods development north of New York City features generous amounts of white oak, which he says is his favorite material.
Settled in the late 1800s in Pleasant Grove, Utah, Snuck Farm is still run by the same family but has now transformed from a traditional farmhouse into a community-oriented organization. The farm’s mission it to promote a sustainable lifestyle and to produce fresh, organic food that benefits the entire community. Louise Hill of Louise Hill Design collaborated with Lloyd Architects studio to design a new barn which combines public, private and work spaces.
Langston-Jones, who grew up in Malaysia and Hong Kong, was attracted to corrugated metal for its its unique edges and visible flecks of material. He left the original 1920s corrugated steel roof and filled the interior with panes of the same material, as well as walls of sanded concrete and a concrete slab. “Inside and outside, there’s only one set of finishes, which succeeds in drawing the outside inside,” he says. “The climate here is wonderful, you can virtually live outside.”
The home’s geometric silhouette echoes the classic typology of the region’s gable roof barns. “We took our inspiration from this vernacular architecture and re-interpreted it with a contemporary twist,” Dworkind says.
Locally sourced Italian slate covers the ground floor rooms; the coat rack near the entrance is from Zanotta.
At the opposite end of the studio, Framework Architecture created a partially enclosed sleeping nook that is spacious enough to fit a full-size bed.
The New Project Group renovated a cramped, uninviting space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The company gave the 400-square-foot apartment a gut renovation, with a new kitchen and bathroom designed for efficiency. A parallelogram-shaped window pane, rescued from an architectural salvage yard, was outfitted with steel edges and casters, and repurposed as a coffee table.
Of the seven steps in Michael Pozner’s not-quite-500-square-foot aerie in Greenwich Village, five contain drawers. His small set of table and chairs is from CB2.
Architect Tom Kundig’s assignment was simple enough: Build a tiny, Thoreau-like getaway for an Atlanta-based writer who owned ten acres on San Juan Island in Puget Sound. "The idea was not to clutter anybody’s thinking, especially a writer’s," he said. So he designed a 500-square-foot retreat that’s both womblike and open to its surroundings.
A rugged exterior of spotted gum cladding and corrugated Spandek material shelter the prefabricated, off-the-grid getaway.