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The primary bed features an inset upholstered headboard and floating nightstands within a paneled wall. The timberwork takes cues from the wood slat and panel language throughout the house, while limewashed walls add another level of tactility to the subtle yet rich material palette.

Designer Ralph Germann inserted a partially glazed box into a 19th-century barn to form the main living space of Christine Bonvin’s home in Switzerland. Soft light enters through original arrow-loop windows.

The Quarry Sauna is a bespoke sauna built on the edge of a lake in a decommissioned quarry. The clients live in an oak timber frame home and wanted a sauna to match the architectural style of the main house.

Out of the Valley designs and manufactures freestanding, outdoor saunas that are separate from the main house. “You can have these spaces in the garden in either rural or urban spaces, or in a woodland so you can walk out to it as part of the experience,” says McKelvie. “Cold water swimming is becoming much more popular and many of our clients want waterside saunas to take that experience to the next level.” The Quarry Sauna is a bespoke sauna built on the shores of a lake.

Sitting lightly above the eelgrass, this tiny dwelling serves as a port of entry for a family getaway on the Salish Sea.

The ultimate escape for forest bathing, Denmark’s Løvtag is a tree house hotel that features three cabins that embrace Scandinavian minimalism. With tree trunks intersecting the interior, large windows, and a rooftop deck, these treehouses promise to make you feel at one with nature.

The renovated parlor-level is a completely open space from front to back, with a door to a balcony that steps down to the garden.

The original home was converted into a bedroom level, and given a second-story addition and roof deck. The dark exterior color, a charcoal-eggplant hue, lets the landscape colors stand out in contrast. “The existing house roof became the roof deck,” says Rogers. “And then I just shifted over the addition so that it floated over the landscape.”

Built in 1946 by a photographer/curator couple, the recently updated home has a backyard studio and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto a large, greenery-filled lot.

The team covered the brick with natural slate exterior cladding called Cupaclad, then added a charcoal-painted vertical siding to the upper portion. A landscape architect changed the exterior entry sequence so it meets the sidewalk, lining the new path with Corten garden beds.

In Australia, a manufacturer and an architecture firm create an off-grid home that can be broken down and shipped across the world.

"In some ways the strongest attributes of the house are probably the outside spaces,” says Court. The original cedar deck was replaced with Kebony decking that wraps around a century-old cherry tree. A pair of Andy rockers from Mamagreen face an ottoman by Kenneth Cobonpue. The accordion doors are a NanaWall SL-60 system that allows the main room of the guesthouse to open completely to the deck.

The home’s two levels used to be connected only by an external staircase. The architects reorganized the floor plan to insert a new indoor stair, which is bordered by a screen of steel cables grounded in stones the couple collected on their beach. The columnar lantern is by Stefan Gulassa, a local artist who made many of the home’s light fixtures.

The experience of the farm includes to the permaculture vegetable garden, fresh farm eggs, interactions with the goats and horses, and hiking through a landscape populated by giraffes, zebras, antelopes, and warthogs.

“I envision people writing their books, music, refuelling their creative flow,” says Castillero. He should know about its energizing power more than anyone, really: it brought him back to his love of architecture, after all. “It’s truly my new happy place.”