Color

With a brand-new plan, vibrant decor, and a bright-yellow door, Ghislaine Viñas reinvigorated a 600-square-foot kit house for her family.

The open-plan living space features a bold orange palette, expressed in the tiled backsplash, the timber joinery, the furnishings, and the checkered floor tiles. “I love how many different playful surfaces and textures are going on, but that they somehow all work together,” says interior designer Dani Dazey.

“The fireplace is the one element in the home that was intentionally left untouched,” she interior designer Festa Radoni. “Its simplicity speaks volumes, and the textured blockwork holds a beauty and history that we didn’t want to erase.”

“The key detail for this door was the hinge being as inconspicuous as possible, while being structurally strong enough to ensure reliable functionality,” says Garneau.

A wall of cabinetry—white-painted cherry veneer with round recessed pulls—provides generous storage capacity, while acting as a dividing wall for the bedroom.

“We felt the apartment was often starved for light, so we wanted to inject our own sunlight into the space—on demand sunsets and sunrises!” says architect and interior designer Robert Garneau.

An orange resin door playfully pivots open and closed to partially separate the sleeping area from the rest of the apartment.

“A lot of renovations today have so much white and gray, and we wanted to run away from that,” says São Paulo native Joyce Prestes. “We really wanted color.”

Two matching Bensen sofas in the second floor living space set the cheerful color palette, accentuated by Moroso Donut poufs, a Barcode credenza, and two Tolomeo suspension lamps.

The architects made sure to step back the upper-level addition so as not to overwhelm the scale of the surrounding neighborhood. Plus, "If we build on top of it, and try to make it a new and larger box, it will falsify the identity,

In Portland, Oregon, a culinary couple called on architect Michael Howells to raise the roof, revamp the floor plan, and spice up the kitchen.

When the rest of the room is neutral, bright colors can help anchor the space and become the stars of the show.

The couple added curved cabinetry and a window seat to form a breakfast nook, painted in Farrow & Ball Red Earth. The table is discontinued from Anthropologie, where Kara previously worked as a display coordinator, and the overhead light is the Lambert & Fils Waldorf Double.

A structure built in a Polish ROD cannot be permanent, nor can it exceed 375 square feet.

London creative studio Unknown Works has bookended brick infill terrace house with two semi-detached additions to provide “space for a young family’s creative pursuits, ensuring the layout could be adapted for hosting parties and intimate family gatherings.” Designed as a kit of prefabricated structural panels in spruce cross-laminated timber (CLT)—chosen as a flexible, cost-effective, sustainable material technology—the additions were assembled on-site in just four days.