Favorites

The Catskills home is located on the banks of the Shandalee Brook.

A cylindrical glass staircase with Western red cedar and painted steel mullions dominates the front of the house. The stair treads, along with the floor, are made of recycled spotted gum.

Portrait of David Barsoum and Niky Sampedro in their store Carefully Picked in Chicago, Illinois IL, with light wood floor and white podiums holding curving blue and red chairs, a light wood chair with green cushion, and a set of nesting coffee tables.

Cabin ANNA began in 2016 as a way for Caspar Schols and his family to cope with a personal tragedy. At his mother’s request, he built a refuge on her rural forested property where the family “would feel connected and feel one,” says Schols. “I started dreaming of how we could be surrounded by life instead of shielded from it.” In ten months, the once physicist completed the Garden House: a prototype of what would, to his own surprise, turn into a much larger project oriented toward a deeper connection with the planet.

The family room on the second floor overlooks the main living area below through a slender opening delineated by a railing. Both floors receive natural light through a rectangular skylight.

Mary and Kundan Bhullar built a shipshape country escape that sits lightly on the land in the Aravalli hills near Gurgaon, India.

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

The impactful entry cladding—made from combed Alaskan Yellow Pine—and the custom front door were splurges in the project’s budget. Bhavani calls the back addition a "periscope" because of how it rises above the original home’s footprint.

Norske Mikrohus’s latest project, Rast, is a 174-square-foot-home that promises to get you closer to nature.

The new, stepped decks run the length of the house, visually and physically connecting both sides of the building.

The covered porch is another place that people can work, brainstorm, or have break-out sessions. The company’s motto is affixed to the boundary wall, reading: “If it tells a story, it’s art.” Stories are about connecting, says Jhanvi, as is architecture.

“There are some great houses in Birmingham,” says Poris. “This one had had been split into two homes during the Depression and there were still remnants of that—two stairs, some of the rooms were chopped up… Many houses like this would be knocked down and replaced, but the client wanted to bring it back to life."

With previous uses a butcher shop, grocery store, window workshop, hat shop, and a restaurant, the mix-and-match facade feels like an appropriate reflection of the renovated home's varied history.