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Dutch architects MVRDV were assigned the beagle, a “curious and playful” breed the firm thought should have some power of its own. An optional cord attached to the portable birch plywood structure means Fido can use the entire thing as a pull toy. At rest, the pooch palace riffs on the traditional Snoopy-esque doghouse silhouette with its simple interior and gabled roof; at play, it becomes a see-saw reminiscent of MVRDV’s own Balancing Barn.
The Tower House is made up of tiny houses, clustered at the southern end of the property and clad in white steel panels and western red cedar shingles. Spinning off the living room on the north side of the main house, the children’s study sits separate from the other pavilions. On its upper level, Oxley netting forms a web on which the kids and their friends can sit and read with views of the leafy street and garden.
If tidiness is paramount for the family, a place for the kids to play outdoors is equally important. The climbing wall at the back of the garden is entirely the work of Mark Tiarks, who built the Composite House and who relished a chance to step out from beneath Tozer’s plans and design an aspect of the house himself.
This trapeze was made by my trapeze teacher when I was living in San Francisco and going to circus school. I lived in a big Victorian house with roommates. The ceilings were so high I could hang the trapeze and practice at home. Now, my kids are taking over: it's the first thing they do when they get up and the last before going to bed.
The rug is an old kilim from Turkey; the Eames lounge chair is the one from my living room growing up in Paris (That is a testament to the great quality of this 30-something-years-old chair); the couch is from Room & Board.
-Sophie Demenge
A family of cost-conscious Hamburgers converted a kitschy turn-of-the-century villa into a high-design home with a strict budget in place. To unite the quaint masonry of the original villa with the squat, ugly add-on built flush against it, the architects decided to paint the old-fashioned facade graphite gray and then covered the box next door in plain, light-colored larch. Photo by Mark Seelen.
"The longer I work as an architect, the more I want to deepen my skills as a gardener," says Yuri Zagorin Alazraki, founder of the Mexico City firm ZD+A. In building his own house in Mexico City’s Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood, his commitment has produced results that appear miraculous. In fact, they grow out of a carefully choreographed series of bravura design moves.
The Brain is a 14,280 cubic-foot cinematic laboratory where the client, a filmmaker, can work out ideas. Physically, that neighborhood birthplace of invention, the garage, provides the conceptual model. The form is essentially a cast-in-place concrete box, intended to be a strong yet neutral background that provides complete flexibility to adapt the space at will. Inserted into the box along the north wall is a steel mezzanine. All interior structures are made using raw, hot-rolled steel sheets. Photo by David Wild.
In Boulder's aptly named Wonderland Hill neighborhood, deer and even mountain lions occasionally come down from the woods to scout the domestic scene, but the most common wildlife sighting on the tree-lined streets is a profusion of toddlers in off-road strollers. To make space for the local baby boom, many older one-story homes have had their pops topped. When Rob Pyatt and Heather Kahn were ready to expand on their 900 square feet, however, their foundation couldn't support a second floor, so Pyatt, an architecture student with a green building background, devised an alternative. His box-shaped addition is the modern kid on the block, with distinctive corrugated-metal and wide-plank cladding. Behind the facade, uncommon materials share a common story with the neighborhood: Of design decisions driven by a desire to keep the next generation—and the planet—healthy and safe.
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