Concrete

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.

The home's different levels create a playful experience for the inhabitants. The concrete floor references the building’s past use as a garage for ambulances.

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.

Sofia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo’s reinforced concrete home in Chile stacks rooms for working in a vertical column atop horizontally-oriented spaces for living.

The Perth residence of Renee Coleman via the Design Files.

Concrete is used for the walls and ceiling and stone for the floors to maintain an urban, industrial feeling.

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.

Turning aggression into art, Israeli designer Itay Ohaly's Fracture Bench explores the effects of smashing materials.