Favorites

A floor lamp nearly eight feet tall anchors the seating area in the living area. Ceilings that are 12 feet tall at the highest point help the room feel expansive. “We needed to find a way to define different areas in a relatively tight space,” Lachapelle says. It’s the clients’ first experience with an open floor plan. “We raised our kids in an old Victorian, and the farmhouse we live in now is chopped up into tiny rooms save for the studio we just added,” the husband says.

The backsplash tile is by Fireclay, the 2x8 field tile in Calcite.

The kitchen grew by about a third, and is covered in terrazzo floor tile from Concrete Collaborative. The cabinets are Ultracraft in Rift Cut White Oak, topped with Caesarstone Quartz in Fresh Concrete. The pendant lights are from Ferm Living and are the Brass Low Socket with Tall Opal Shade.

The team preserved the deck, but installed a new railing.

“It was great to work from the plans of someone who was a part of the history of architecture,” says Drapszo.

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 house is about 3,000 square feet with six bedrooms, four of them on the second floor, surrounding a stairway to the large open space below where cooking, dining, game-playing, and movie-watching take place.

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.”

The original building is set around an L-shaped courtyard. The main entrance is next to the carport on the street side, with a second entry toward the back of the house.

Casa Sombreros comprises two interconnected, rectangular volumes parallel to the lake. The larger volume contains the living spaces and extends northwards to capture natural light.

The architects created a simple, shed-like refuge so as to not detract from the surrounding environment.

Fortunately, the damaged exterior and dismally dark 1970s interior didn’t scare away NMT Financial, who were captivated by the home wrapped around a massive oak tree embedded into the inner courtyard. Oakland-based See Arch was hired to restore the home’s modernist character while updating the dwelling to contemporary standards.

Klopf Architecture's modest 72-square-foot addition at the front of the home blends in with the original structure while giving the owners a greater sense of openness in the master and hall bathrooms. Inside, the re-imagined great room now features dining space.

When Rob and Mary Lubera started pulling threads to uncover the origins of their new home—the lone midcentury house amid rows of Tudor Revivals in suburban Detroit—not even architecture scholars could have anticipated what they would find. Theirs is the last surviving residence by Alexander Girard (1907–1993), a modernist visionary who made his name in textiles but tried his hand at virtually everything, architecture included. The shoji-like laminate screens, seen in the entryway, are characteristic of his Japanese-influenced work.

The gabled addition is topped with a standing seam metal roof and is clad in vertical corrugated metal siding.