Concrete

After purchasing a thin, L-shaped lot in Tokyo, Tamotsu Nakada asked architect and friend Koji Tsutsui to create an open-plan concrete home to fit the site. Photo by Iwan Baan.

When Belgian fashion retailer Nathalie Vandemoortele was seeking a new nest for her brood, she stumbled upon a fortresslike house in the countryside designed in 1972 by a pair of Ghent architects, Johan Raman and Fritz Schaffrath. While the Brutalist concrete architecture and petite but lush gardens suited her tastes to a tee, the interiors needed a few updates.

The living room is further lit by three protruding skylights angled to catch morning and afternoon light.

The unadorned street-facing facade of the house belies the light, open, tranquil space inside.

Pros: Concrete countertops are durable, resistant to heat, and can be less expensive than natural stone, especially when completed as a DIY project. Cons: Concrete must be sealed before being used; otherwise, its porous nature means that it will stain very easily.

The bathrooms feature the same polished concrete flooring and poured concrete counters found elsewhere in the home. A honed granite recessed shower provides a visual counterpoint to the sea of white and steel.

A minimalist approach to design can make spaces feel thoughtful, bright, and more spacious than they really are—qualities that are paramount to a recent project in Poznań by Polish architecture firm mode:lina. The architects employed several tricks to make the home feel more spacious. Among them, mirrors were installed to visually enlarge the room, and smart storage spaces—even a recessed dog house—were built directly into the home’s walls. “The less visible [storage is], the better,” they say.

Concrete stairs leading up to a sleeping loft are illuminated with wall sconces.

Acoustic Shells (Flanagan Lawrence: Littlehampton, United Kingdom) A visual response to the sand dunes and sea near the shore, these whisper-thin concrete curves were shaped with material sprayed on mesh, measuring merely 100 millimeters in spots. The twin bell curves function as a bandstand on one side, and a larger version of a seashell on the other—it plays back the sea’s gentle rhythms.

A mesh steel bridge sits above a cast concrete outdoor canopy on the patio. Concrete floors are polished on the inside, and kept rough on the outside. A pine door leading to a lower level bedroom adds warmth.