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Viewed from a good distance down the slope running to the Union River, the Maison Amtrak is clearly oriented toward the river. The deck is sheltered from the neighbors’ view by Cohen’s bedroom to the right and the living room at left.

When Jeremy and Robin Levine remodeled their house in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, they chose to keep it at the scale, if not the style, of other houses in the neighborhood. They expanded it back and front by building shady decks around existing trees. The sliding, slatted doors of triple-panel wood reinforce the inside-outside living experience.

Sobek is particularly enthusiastic about textiles (the altar he built for the Pope’s visit to Bavaria in 2006 makes use of a fabric “tent”), which he finds both tactilely pleasing and rife with potential for high-tech applications like solar energy harvesting.

The dark green tones of the Panama rug (in the aptly named Kale colorway) work with the dark timber furniture and potted plant to evoke a sense of the natural world and bring character to an otherwise minimal interior. “The new jute rugs are so versatile, working across many different decorative styles,” says Armadillo co-founder, Jodie Fried.

Perkins & Will designs a mountaintop Passive House that takes energy efficiency to the next level.