FACADES

Vines were added up the side of the building. These naturally help cool down the building and on an aesthetic level, serve as a winding green beacon catching eyes at street level. For industrial buildings, that aren’t often all that welcoming and more or less categorically disconnected from nature, these interventions go a long way.

The T&G fine line exterior siding was stained a custom color.

Only the windows from the sitting room, looking into the backyard, are original. The rest are from Marvin's Ultimate collection, selected to match the mull detail of the originals.

Before: The couple loved the neighborhood and the old oaks on the property. “I knew the house needed to be fixed up,” says Kim. “But I liked the layout and the structure and the fact that it was all on one level.”

Landscape designer Johnny Hirsch of PLACE laid out gardens featuring boardwalk and flagstone paths and native and drought-tolerant plants. The chairs around the fire pit are from Costco.

With no major structural work to do, the design team focused on things like color, and on the exterior they paired Benjamin Moore’s Cabbage Patch green with a front door painted in the company’s Tawny Day Lily. “Kim had a lot of really great people on the project,” Bestor explains, “and that made it possible to go super fast and still be design-y and not just do a white box.”

The architect placed only a few windows on the eastern and northern facades, which intersect in a pronounced curve, to maintain privacy.

The compact home, clad in white acrylic stucco, features windows on the southern and western facades, opening the home to the lush hillside.

Architect Minwook Choi’s 710-square-foot Seroro House rises from a tiny urban lot in Seoul that had long been neglected because of its challenging size.

The third-level balcony is planted with vines that will gradually grow and cascade over the home’s facade.

A view of the front door, made of local lapacho. Above it, the second level is enveloped in wood cladding, whose deep brown tones are starting to fade and lighten. “We like that very much,” says Smud. “And the plants are growing and advancing over the wood.”