Concrete

The lower level has a reinforced concrete frame. The timber and concrete surfaces are left exposed throughout the home. Tolomeo lights from Artemide hang above one of the beds.

Casteñada explains, “Everything starts with an interview that I personally conduct with the owner in order to understand his lifestyle and expectations. The final result needs to satisfy the owner’s lifestyle, dreams and expectations, as well as my firm’s vision and design concepts.”

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

The Perth residence of Renee Coleman via the Design Files.

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.

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.

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.

House in Matosinhos is a minimal home located in Matosinhos, Portugal, created by nu.ma. The lot, where the house is inserted, has a non-regular shape, longitudinal, and perpendicular to the street Nossa Senhora da Conceição. It was important to keep the alignment of the house with the existing buildings in order to avoid formal irregularities within the street development. The interior spatial distribution is separated by function and by floors. Due to the longitudinal nature of the lot, the architects proposed an internal yard at the center of the home to allow for natural light to enter the dining/living room and kitchen.

“Exposing the craft and detail of the materials was a key part of the design,” Flato notes. The texture of the house, he says, can be observed in the concrete retaining wall for the lap pool.

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

Once through the street-level entrance, the property's modern garage door comes into view. Stairs lead up to the kitchen.

The dining room leads onto a terrace with a built-in concrete table and barbecue that are original to Raman and Schaffrath’s design. A pair of Hardoy butterfly chairs from Knoll are positioned by the pond.

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.

NAMELESS Architecture is a design practice run by Unchung Na, Sorae Yoo, and Kiseok Oh. Founded in New York, it has since expanded to Seoul, South Korea. The RW Concrete Church in Byeollae, a newly developed district in northeastern Seoul, "is set to become part of a new urban environment, materialized through its simplistic form, unified materiality, and program-based continuation of space," the firm says. Photo courtesy of NAMELESS Architecture.

Delivering a modern look, concrete serves as a long-lasting, hardwearing material.

The house is intended to be experienced as a continuous sequence from the public living areas to the private office and bedrooms. Instead of organizing the plan linearly, Priatman thought of it as a spiral that wraps around a central green space.

Nakada works from an Alvar Aalto table in the living and dining area, adjacent to the kitchen. He saved on some elements, such as the plywood cabinetry, and splurged on others, such as the Finn Juhl chairs and Vilhelm Lauritzen lamp. A skylight beneath the angled roof allows in a sliver of constantly changing light.