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At just under 14 feet wide, the CH House could have felt cramped. But the architects created empty volumes within the plan to make it feel more spacious and airy. Standing in the double-height library, where there’s enough vertical space for a tree to grow, one can see down into the shared living areas and up into a kid’s bedroom at the fifth floor.

The main entry opens up to an expansive living room, while a long hallway continues behind the kitchen and leads back outside. A skylight appears to divide the home in half, creating an interplay of light, space, and form.

One of five bedrooms in the mains residence, the master bedroom features custom-designed furniture and a wrap-around glass walls. The numerous bedrooms make the property attractive for use as a vacation rental.

Storey calls this house the “Eel’s Nest,” after the narrow urban properties that go by that name in Japan. Its façade was originally going to be wood, but because of local building codes and the fact the building is built along the edge of the property line, the exterior had to be fireproof. Storey covered it with stucco instead. “I wanted it to look as rough as possible,” says the architect. “Since it’s such a small house, it needed to be tough-looking.” The workshop at ground level measures less than 200 square feet, but is set up to accommodate any kind of woodworking or welding; when not in use, the architect parks his car inside.

Anne Suttles waters the bamboo muhly, palo verde, strawberry tree, and magic carpet thyme thriving in their Austin yard.

Capping off the second floor is a 14-foot-tall glazed window wall, a dramatic scale change from the original Victorian interior.

The kitchen is steps from the garden, which grows as an ever-changing backdrop on the far end of the room.

A third-floor kitchen looks out over a balcony garden and city views. Bar stools by Pick Up line the centralized island.

Perched below the Griffith Observatory and overlooking Hollywood is a lush lot crowned with four towering olive trees and a 1965 home designed by modernist architect Craig Ellwood. When a young couple purchased the home in 2018, it needed substantial work. For a historic restoration, they called on Woods + Dangaran, a local firm fluent in modernist history. The team completed a meticulous restoration of the home while keeping original components like the linear shape, open plan, and expansive windows. One of the most striking features is the original koi pond (a feature deemed so essential that its preservation was a condition of escrow) that is now crossed via a bridge that leads to a new lap pool—perhaps the biggest intervention on the property.

Small, simple, yet fully functional, La Casa Nueva is an off-grid timber camper designed by Ecuador-based architect Juan Alberto Andrade. He created the dwelling as a personal retreat for himself and his partner, Cuqui Rodríguez, to travel throughout the country photographing various forms of architecture.

David and Mayuko Lai’s Japanese-inspired home hides technology, doors, and storage space with smart solutions.

Garcia clad the ADU’s exterior with a local Texas limestone, similar in color and texture to the main house, “just to tie the two together visually,” says the architect.

Multiple Hytte cabins can be clustered together to create a village layout.

A large sliding glass door connects the living and dining area with a balcony. Views from the interior look out onto the surrounding neighborhood and downtown Sydney in the distance.

The ground-floor living room features a low bench adorned with objets d’art that runs beneath a window that frames views of the surrounding trees.

For Gabriel Ramirez and his partner Sarah Mason Williams, following the Sea Ranch rules—local covenants guide new designs—didn’t mean slipping into Sea Ranch clichés. The architects love Cor-Ten steel, with its ruddy and almost organic surface, and they made it the main exterior material, along with board-formed concrete and ipe wood. The Cor-Ten, which quickly turned an autumnal rust in the sea air, and the concrete, with its grain and crannies, mean the house isn’t a pristine box, Ramirez says. His Neutra house “was very crisp and clean,” he says. “This house is more distressed, more wabi-sabi.”