Collection by Sarah Lance
Before/After
The Alexandria House uses a material palette of polished concrete floors, ruddy hardwood accents, and smooth white plaster. Black covers entire walls in the living room and kitchen and threads throughout the home, popping up everywhere from the iron railing outside to the decorative picture frames inside.
“When you’re doing a second home, a lot of the character of the design is defined by what it isn’t,” says architect Greg Howe, as a way of explaining the minimalistic approach that was taken on this Michigan weekend home. “If you think of it as cold, you have to remember, the setting, and accessing nature, is the point.”
Schaer replaced the garage’s crumbling wooden posts with an earthquake-resistant steel frame. He also excavated beneath the building, establishing a basement level for a workshop, storage, laundry, and water heater. The earth removed in the process was shoveled into concrete “boxes” in the yard. These form a raised terrace from which you can see the Olympic mountains.
Joaquin Altamirano and Silvia Martín worked with Daniel Bergman Vázquez of Estudio Untercio to create an open-plan oasis in an apartment building in central Madrid. Estudio Untercio designed the medium-density fiberboard cupboards, which are coated with lacquer paint matching the ceramic-porcelain countertops. The tubular hood above the island is by Teka.
Emilie Bédard and Maria Rosa Di Ioia of EM Architecture gave Erik Rydingsvärd’s top-floor apartment in a Montreal triplex a subdued, modern look that evokes his native Denmark. The range hood and satin-finished teak cabinets are by Kastella. The floors are Douglas fir and the walls are spruce, painted white.















