Farmhouse

Because of the mirrored interior, the VELUX Group placed the roof windows towards the northeast in an effort to minimize any direct light, and hence uncomfortable heat, within the studio.

White paint with just a hint of gray dominates the farmhouse, reflecting Kolasiński’s love of bright spaces. The pine wooden floors were also enameled in a white oil imported from Denmark.

The second-floor office is housed inside a rounded rectangle of concrete that the architect inserted on top of the old farmhouse.

Upper level floor plan.

Lower level floor plan.

The modern staircase was built with the same salvaged wall planks that are used as flooring throughout.

In the existing house, the wood beams were hidden under sheetrock and wallpaper. "I exposed them all, but I didn't let that dictate where the new walls would go," Givone says. "I let the beams fall where they may."

A glass-lined shower with a Hudson Reed showerhead adds a modern touch to the second-floor bathroom. A pane of privacy glass lets natural light enter the room.

“When you’re working on something inexpensive and then decide you don’t like it, fine. You’re not tearing down millions of kroners worth of work.” —Mette Lyng Hansen

Balanced above the central core, the office offers an ideal perch for work with a west-facing skylight that provides natural illumination for the shared desk space.

Inside, the custom-built casework and splashes of blue and red stand out. Jurkovič designed a central "service box" on the ground floor, so open space wraps around the plywood-encased core which contains the kitchen, bathroom, toilet, stairs, and storage.

The garden-facing "ganok," an under-roof porch, connects the home with the outdoors. A key part of traditional homes, according to Jurkovič, the ganok gives these narrow buildings on small plots of land more outdoor space.

On an 18th-century farmstead in rural Sweden, two Copenhagen designers have handcrafted a summerhouse that seamlessly melds the modern and the traditional. The simple, pared-down aesthetic and the open-ended time frame of the project—along with the pair's building and design skills—helped Mads Odgård and Lyng Hansen achieve their renovation on a miniscule budget, with a project outline that ebbed and flowed with Odgård’s professional successes in product design.

A look at Truedatorp's floor plan.

"Architecture exists through states of contrast; the building as a bridge between a wooded forest and a field, a strong roof line against a backdrop of trees or mountains. In these states of contrast we truly start to see where we live." -Architect Steve Kredell

"It only cost about $48,000 to build, which was incredibly cheap," says Turner of the Stealth Barn. "We got the Timber Frame Company to supply the shell, then we clad it and fitted out the interior and windows ourselves. The idea was to take the archetypal black tar-painted agricultural building and make an almost childlike icon of that."

"Like the old farmhouses and barns of the Champlain Valley, the Foote Farm House has a clearly ordered wood frame on a sturdy foundation, an exterior skin made of local materials, an economy of form with tried-and-true proportions, a central fire place, and a common-sense relationship to the sun and the weather." - Architect John McLeod