Favorites

Residents enter the house from the street through the upper level, which contains the bedrooms. The rafters were removed to create additional loft space.

Mid-century designer Jens Risom's A-framed prefab family retreat, located on the northern portion of Block island, is bordered by a low stone wall, an aesthetic element that appears throughout the land.

Matthew Hufft designed the house that he shares with his wife, Jesse, and their three children to sit inconspicuously among its neighbors in the Roanoke Park area of Kansas City, Missouri. The backyard and porch, which is furnished with a Saarinen Round Dining Table and Emeco Navy chairs, is a popular setting for warm-weather entertaining.

Large paver patios make excellent walkways.

Architect Jesse Garlick’s rural Washington vacation home references its rugged surroundings. The steel cladding has developed a patina similar to the ochre-red color of bedrock found in the area.

Brandon and Amy set up different workstations in the living area.

North Haven locals nonplussed by Bobbie Callahan and Ed Hayes’s unusual retreat lit upon its cinematic qualities, calling it “the Strand” after the nearest movie theater on the mainland.

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.

Designer Sohei Nakanishi created a seaside family getaway in Japan’s Chiba prefecture as a retreat from urban life. The facade integrates a mix of natural materials that reference the home’s surroundings, in addition to a courtyard that sports a bright-citrus accent shade.

“We sought to create a house that would not damage the environment and not be too visible,” says architect Tina Gregorič. A single zigzagging roof stretches over 5,380 square feet, doubling the area of the interior spaces and serving as an ideal spot for sunset cocktails and whale-watching.

The house that Fleetwood Fernandez Architects designed for contractor Mehran Taslimi and his wife, Laila, embraces its surroundings. “They wanted doors that they could just throw open,” designer Hunter Fleetwood says of the retractable wall system from Vitrocsa.

A LEED Platinum status house retrofitted by Kaufmann.