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.

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.

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.

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.