Farmhouse

Before the Moumings built their house, they camped out on their six acres while preparing the land for farming, planting grass and clover in place of soybean stubble. As the house arose from its foundation, soil-fixing plants grew from seed. Now the couple can focus on growing food.

In upstate New York, two families unite to design a vacation house that will suit all their needs for years to come.

Marston (on the porch with sons Eddie, left, and George) designed the new brick house to reference outbuildings on the property.

In the farmhouse architect Lucy Marston built for her family in Suffolk, England, she balanced off-the-shelf pieces, such as a velvet-covered sofa from sofa.com, with customized key elements, like the kitchen. The refrigerator is from Fisher & Paykel, and the tiles are from Topps Tiles.

The bed and side table in the master bedroom are from Loaf. In the adjacent bathroom, an antique mirror hangs above a Duravit sink. “There’s a slight Arts and Crafts feel to it,” says Marston of the house.

A Lisbon freestanding tub and “a church chair from a junk shop” complete the children’s bathroom.

Bold color continues in the entrance hall. The bench is from an antiques fair.

The facade of the three-bedroom house sports a series of extruded pine boxes, which create sheltered spaces that stand up to the area’s fluctuating weather. The owners, Isaac Pineus and Andrew Duncanson, spend summers here with their twin sons.

The exterior of the new, two-story home in East Austin, Texas was designed with a minimal palette, bronze windows, and steel details in order to blend into the existing cityscape.

The simple, pared-down aesthetic and the open-ended time frame of the project—along with the couples’ building and design skills—helped 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.

With a few small changes and regular maintenance, existing buildings are some of the most sustainable around.

In the kitchen area and throughout the home, Mads Odgård, shown here, and Mette Lyng Hansen mixed Odgård’s pieces, such as the Odgård kettle for Raadvad and custom table, with Ikea basics and the Workshop pendant lamp by Louis Poulsen.

On an 18th-century farmstead in rural Sweden, two Copenhagen designers handcraft a summerhouse that seamlessly melds the modern and the traditional.

One of the few designer pieces in the home, a set of four Michael Thonet coffee house chairs, from 1859, offer a simple seating solution. The dining table, designed by Odgård, was built from a 109-year-old oak tree, which was harvested and milled locally.

BLAIR NICHE PROJECT At just $167 per square foot, this high-design, low-cost barn in rural Wisconsin is an American idyll.

PROD Architecture + Design created a farmhouse in Penafiel, Portugal to fuse the aesthetic of traditional homes in the region with contemporary, floor-to-ceiling windows that respond to the environment. Made up of four distinct structures, the home takes on the shape of an existing gabled-roof structure on the site. To complement the stone building, the home incorporates a series of muted materials including granite for the base, zinc for the roof, and Scandinavian pinewood for cladding.