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Noticing a void in the market, he partnered with renowned Australian architect and champion of sustainability, Peter Stutchbury, on Dimensions X, a start-up offering responsible, affordable, and architecturally-pleasing pre-crafted homes at the click of a button.

Years of warming in California have threatened snowpack levels in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In March 2015, photographer Max Whittaker trained his lens on skiers navigating patches of exposed dirt at Palisades Tahoe, a ski resort in Olympic Valley.

The original fireplace was kept, as was the interior clerestory windows that divide the main living area from the hall and master suite. The floors were replaced with red oak to align with preserved red oak flooring in the bedroom.

The compact house is sheathed in cypress, glass, and copper and features an expandable roof.

Visual artist Amélia Marta enlisted Portuguese architecture firm Madeiguincho to design a space where she could stargaze, make art, or just sit and think. To create the multipurpose but still economical interior, the designers got inventive with windows and wood.

The squiggly Bacterio laminate by Ettore Sottsass on the kitchen countertops was dead stock, and the HEWI drawer pulls were diligently sourced on eBay.

An oculus-like central skylight hangs overtop the great room.

The double-height ceiling makes the living room of this compact cabin feel downright grand.

This Beverly Hills kitHAUS is comprised of modernist prefab modules that can accommodate a variety of uses: from yoga studios to home offices, and from weekend retreats to pop-up kiosks and guest rooms.

The weeHouse exteriors are clad in corrugated Cor-Ten, but with a custom pattern of folds to create an organic randomness. The foundations were designed with a shallow recess around the top to make the modules look like they’re hovering. After they bought the property in early 2014, the Siegels camped there for two summers while they saved up money and planned a permanent structure. In his research, BJ came across this design, a customizable prefab house by Alchemy Architects. "Of all the things that I found, I was drawn to that one because it was absolutely the simplest and cleanest," he says.

Transforming shipping containers into habitable spaces is a growingly popular subset of prefab. Just off the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Martha Moseley and Bill Mathesius adapted an unused concrete foundation to create a home made from 11 stacked shipping containers. "We were inspired by the site, and our desire to have something cool and different," says Moseley.

The custom sliding window screens, which shield from solar gain, were designed by the couple and are a modernized reference to the operable shutters that Denise remembers from her childhood in Austria. They first used the idea on one of their apartment buildings.

Now, built-in sofas line the perimeter of the room and utilize the room’s shape better.

The piston-operated pine sunshades lift upwards to protect the exterior deck and give residents the ability to manually modulate the home’s access to daylight and shade as the sun moves across the sky.

The home takes the form of two volumes that slide past each other. The front door leads directly to the center of the home, which connects to the both the entrance courtyard and the rear pool area, dissolving the boundaries between interior and exterior space.