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A bright reading nook captures the home's color and material palette: polished concrete floors, white walls, and oak cabinetry. The windows in the reading nook (and also the kitchen and the master bathroom) are a more expensive, frameless model.

A covered breezeway connects the main house and the guest house. Here, Legge took the opportunity to play with perspective, framing part of a tree and the sky with an abstract roof cutout.

Candour is a prefab building system and a tool to customize building components within that system—including walls, floors, facades, and roofs—with a proprietary CAD plug-in. Users of the software can draft a design, determine if it’s feasible, and price it all in one day. Designs are built at Candour’s manufacturing facility in Sunshine, Melbourne.

He made the shelving, cabinets, and shroud in the kitchen from a felled maple tree.

Whether it’s cross-country skiing in the winter or trail running in the summer, the 330-foot home’s minimalist design encourages Catherine to be outside in the surrounding landscape throughout the year.

A see-through entry hall joins the living areas with a bedroom wing.

After renting in San Francisco for a decade, DIY couple Molly Fiffer and Jeff Waldman bought 10 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the pair and their friends built a cabin compound complete with sheds, tree decks, a pavilion, a wood-fired hot tub, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower. The cabin is made from locally sourced, rough-sawn redwood, which the couple stained with nontoxic Eco Wood Treatment to give the panels an aged appearance and a dark patina.

The home is currently being rented out to recoup some building costs, and the owners are considering a permanent move after their daughter leaves for college.

The house is well equipped for weather conditions in an area known for intense winds and heavy snowfall during the winter months.

A cozy study with custom banquette and Japanese elm table is located on the north side of the living room.

Derek Gray of Bay West Builders made the entry bench from wood earmarked for an unbuilt breakfast bar. Radiant-heated concrete floors offer a polished counterpoint to the board-formed walls outside.

“From anywhere in the house, you have a sense of the outdoors,” says Melonie, “and yet it’s very private.” Ikegami agrees. “The building was really about the landscape—it can dissolve into the background,” he says. In the master bedroom, Japanese Tansu chests from the couple’s previous home flank a Duxiana bed. The full-height windows and swing door are from Western Window Systems.

A 100-year-old oak shades the front of the house, which is clad in weathering yellow cedar.

Recently retired and ready to downsize, Paul and Melonie Brophy found a lot in Palo Alto that gave them the chance to start fresh. Their glass, concrete, and wood house, designed by Feldman Architecture, seems to float above a landscape by Bernard Trainor. Of the board-formed concrete wall, architect Taisuke Ikegami says, "It connects the building to the ground plane while allowing the house to be a landscape element."