Architecture

The Acacia tree in the home's central courtyard was one of the things that first attracted the homeowners to the property. Both the husband and wife are from Johannesburg, and the latter notes that this tree is the quintessential African tree. "I wanted to see it every day when I woke up," she said. "I wanted the house to wrap around it."

One of Leanne’s more pleasant surprises during the remodel was finding hundreds of stunning first-edition and vintage books in the basement, “which have all happily found their way back up stairs to the living room and the library,” she says.

A series of curved walls and tall floor-to-ceiling windows face the interior courtyard of the home.

The clients—a family of five with three children in college—wanted to create an “urban cabin” that embraces the tranquil forested site on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The solution was to use vast expanses of glass to dissolve the boundaries between inside and out.

Reclaimed wood covers the ceiling in the main room and bedroom. The large white light fixture was reused from the barn’s previous incarnation, and the sectional is from Interior Define.

The Alerce shingles change color when it rains, moving from red to grey. “It’s alive,” says Marambio.

The family home that residents Tyler Lepore, Lisa Giroday, builders Hanson Land & Sea, and September Architecture devised in the Sunshine Coast region of British Columbia, Canada, is wrapped with cedar and brick, tying to its wooded surround, which is only a four-minute walk to the ocean. "The house feels like it's part of the setting,

This thatch-roofed brick cottage in Nieby, Germany, was originally built by tenant farmers or crofters from a nearby estate in the late 1800s. It stands on a small triangular plot of land surrounded by barley fields and faces toward the Geltinger Birk nature reserve. The home’s street-facing facade was preserved and restored with only a minimal, black-steel dormer window belying the more substantial alterations which open onto the private rear yard. A subtle black-framed addition containing an oak-lined living space is tucked under the thatched roof and opens onto a sunken timber terrace while large picture windows are cut into the historic brick volume in areas which had been damaged from the previous additions.

Double doors open to the deck.

“MA03 Library House was designed to meet the requirements of a ceramicist and a lawyer in need of a home capable of holding their extensive book collection as well as providing them with spaces for work and creative activity,” say Fria Folket, the architect behind this cabin in Sweden.

The home’s three low-lying rooflines subtly emerge from the landscape.