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Not everyone has a credibility bookcase. Your kids’ discarded toys and jackets may be strewn on the floor, or your roommate is in the throes of an online boxing class. Perhaps your cat is licking its unmentionables, and it’s not quite the scene you want to set for your one-on-one. Luckily, Zoom makes it easy to manifest the environment we want if the environment we have isn’t ideal. If you’ve ever wanted to dial in from a Dwell house, now’s your chance.

West Facade

For all its hard environmental work, one of the most immediate of the Blue Sky Home’s pleasures is how it sits so snugly in its desert surroundings.

A shaded parking lot near the entrance of the house.

A pair of Icelandic prefab pioneers deliver an efficient family home in Culver City. Building smarter is at the heart of everything designers Tryggvi Thorsteinsson and Erla Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir do. Whether they’re testing the limits of indoor/outdoor living or developing a prefabricated wall system that they hope will make traditional wood framing a thing of the past, the founders of the Santa Monica design studio Minarc are consumed with making structures stronger, lighter, and more efficient.

In the kitchen, a blue glass backsplash evokes the designers’ native Iceland. The Bend Goods stools are from YLiving.

Minarc’s Plus Hus is a tiny energy-efficient prefab marketed towards homeowners seeking to add an accessory dwelling unit to their property. The 320-square-foot structure is prefabricated in downtown Los Angeles, and it can be shipped flatpack to anywhere in the U.S. with prices starting at $37,000.

LivingHomes holds weekly, scheduled tours of this LivingHome in Santa Monica.

Near the front door, charred oak treads float on a blackened steel stringer to the master suite and on to the roof.

For the front deck, the couple chose a dining set by Teak Smith; the driftwood and metal corkscrew is by sculptor David Tanych. - Santa Monica, California Dwell Magazine : July / August 2017

Minarc’s GRASSsit bar stools, topped with synthetic turf recycled from football fields, sit near the barbecue.

Located atop a mountain between two valleys, DH House frames views of Nanchang and the ocean on one side and views of the mountains on the other.

Built on a tight budget of $120,000, a retirement home in the mountains delivers unexpected contemporary design to a rural township.

RES4’s modular approach provides a Brooklyn family with a beautiful weatherproof retreat on Long Island. Designed as a hybrid between a double-wide and a courtyard house, the 1,650-square-foot North Fork Bay House was prefabricated off-site as two modules. In addition to time and cost savings, prefabrication helped address the restricted building site, which has a very long and narrow footprint limited by FEMA setback regulations and zoning laws.

The concrete foundation was poured on top of a rock outcropping, so that the house would feel like part of the natural features of the site.

The dreamy rooftop looks out over Noe Valley. Built-in redwood benches surround a concrete fire pit; the bluestone pavers are part of a Bison deck system. An oversize, barrel-like teak hot tub from Roberts Hot Tubs allows for a soak in the garden-like setting, which features plants selected and installed by Danielle Coulter of Collecting Flowers.

The master bedroom features a large grid of windows that "gets likened to Dürer’s Device (an early method for understanding perspective)," shares Hackett.

The great room is designed for indoor/outdoor living. The floor-to-ceiling glass wall at the back of the space (which is just a slice of the all-glass rear) includes a bi-fold NanaWall door system that opens the home to an outdoor terrace and the lush surroundings.

The second storey patio is accessed from the master bedroom via an internal corridor or from the common areas via an external bridge. Each route lets occupants engage with the first storey via the void.