Erickson Inspiration

A second green roof is planted with sedum and plays host to one of the family’s favorite spots: a hammock. Bentheim suggested adding a trellis overhead to soften and balance the appearance of the facade.

Tack Architects designed the house to frame views of the surrounding landscape. The trellis offers shading and controls the amount of daylight that shines inside (and creates a dramatic passage along the house's perimeter).

Frequent visits to Calistoga Ranch left a Los Angeles couple hankering for even more time amid Napa Valley’s tranquil vineyards, so they realized it was the right moment to build their post-retirement dream home in California Wine Country. Wade Design Architects and Geremia Design knew exactly how to bring it to life.

"The buildings recall the agricultural forms of the local built environment, but as is our nature in our designs, we sought to take that context and evolve it to a more emphatic modern language. We sought to design something that was exquisitely proportioned in a quiet, agricultural way." –Tom Kundig, Design Principal

Millerton Farmhouse | Olson Kundig

“When you’re doing a second home, a lot of the character of the design is defined by what it isn’t,” says architect Greg Howe, as a way of explaining the minimalistic approach that was taken on this Michigan weekend home. “If you think of it as cold, you have to remember, the setting, and accessing nature, is the point.”

The house is part of a working agrarian landscape, with its three distinct volumes—day pavilion, night pavilion, and shed—inspired by the local vernacular architecture.

Riffing on local farmhouses, architects Patrick Walker and Elizabeth Demetriades covered the 4,000-square-foot house in rough-sawn red cedar and capped it with a standing-seam galvalume roof.

"The bold concrete forms [in DS House] create a blank backdrop for the reinstatement of the indigenous landscape after bushfires...triggered a requirement for the majority of the vegetation to be removed,

Located 2,600 feet above sea level in Upper Austria, the Mountain House sits at the intersection of the low lands and the Alps.

Arba, the architecture firm founded by Jean-Baptiste Barache and Sihem Lamine, designed a 1,786-square-foot residence for Dominique Jacquot 45 minutes outside Paris. The house is her sanctuary from city life.

When Jeff Taylor and Alex Miller designed the Pull House in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, they took “form follows function” one step further: Form describes function. Along the house’s facades, deep window openings pop through the silvery, white-cedar cladding in bright bursts. “The punches of color are points of personal expression,” says Taylor, cofounder of Taylor and Miller Architecture and Design. “They let the vitality of the residents leak out so passersby can experience the inside from the outside."

Architect Dan Rockhill tackled a tight budget and a steep slope to build a modern Midwest haven for a family in Lawrence, Kansas, who had just $214,000 to spend on design and construction. His biggest flourish was a slatted exterior screen of Cumaru wood that shields the inexpensive metal siding.

The young and busy family (the couple have twin teenage girls and a toddler) also runs their equine business from the property’s stables.

Cantilevered out over the hillside the residence, which also serves as the couple's primary residence, is threaded between the trees, anchored by its concrete foundation which stops just short of the tree’s roots.

After: The barn’s original framing was kept for its agricultural character. Faulkner Architects applied an exterior envelope of salvaged redwood and added a Cor-Ten steel roof that will patina over time.

Two hours north of New York City, an unusual barn emerges from a hill just off a country road. Its black siding and bright-red window frames hint at the imaginative playground inside. This space, with its rope-railed catwalk and indoor tent, is just one element of the multifaceted getaway architecture and design firm BarlisWedlick Architects designed for fund manager Ian Hague.