Concrete

After purchasing a thin, L-shaped lot in Tokyo, Tamotsu Nakada asked architect and friend Koji Tsutsui to create an open-plan concrete home to fit the site. Photo by Iwan Baan.

When Belgian fashion retailer Nathalie Vandemoortele was seeking a new nest for her brood, she stumbled upon a fortresslike house in the countryside designed in 1972 by a pair of Ghent architects, Johan Raman and Fritz Schaffrath. While the Brutalist concrete architecture and petite but lush gardens suited her tastes to a tee, the interiors needed a few updates.

The living room is further lit by three protruding skylights angled to catch morning and afternoon light.

Yumi (left) and Maya (right) cheese around on the steps leading into the front door. Inside, there is ample space for removing and leaving one's shoes, another Japanese element.

The unadorned street-facing facade of the house belies the light, open, tranquil space inside.

Light Show: Resolution: 4 pierced a concrete wall edging the exterior stairwell with acrylic cylinders to make a clever lighting installation. The cylinders transmit sunlight during the day, Tanney explains, and at night the installation becomes a “backlit constellation” triggered by motion sensors.

A minimalist approach to design can make spaces feel thoughtful, bright, and more spacious than they really are—qualities that are paramount to a recent project in Poznań by Polish architecture firm mode:lina. The architects employed several tricks to make the home feel more spacious. Among them, mirrors were installed to visually enlarge the room, and smart storage spaces—even a recessed dog house—were built directly into the home’s walls. “The less visible [storage is], the better,” they say.

Concrete stairs leading up to a sleeping loft are illuminated with wall sconces.

Sofia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo’s reinforced concrete home in Chile stacks rooms for working in a vertical column atop horizontally-oriented spaces for living.

Turning aggression into art, Israeli designer Itay Ohaly's Fracture Bench explores the effects of smashing materials.