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The 1950 Eichler home in Palo Alto, California, that Ogawa Fisher Architects renovated for a family of five features a cool gray facade punctuated by a bright orange front door.

An integrated oak bench with storage bridges the kitchen and the dining area, where a massive oak table is surrounded by orange dining chairs.

“We designed this home so that we can be here forever,” says Steph. Accessibility features include a ramp leading to the front door and showers with small curbs. The materials selected for the deck and roof intentionally have 40-year lifespans, while gutter protectors eliminate the need for cleaning: “There will be a point where we don’t need to be on ladders cleaning out gutters,” adds Steph.

Tasked with renovating a 1950s ranch in Northern California, Ogawa Fisher Architects revived an existing Japanese garden at the center of the home as a central organizing element. Low-slung, wide decks (inspired by the Japanese “engawa,” or elevated walkway) and deep roof soffits expand the living spaces, frame views, and blur the boundaries between inside and outside. The garden is the second of three courtyards that orients the various wings of the home from front to back, creating a vast sense of openness while also maintaining privacy from other areas of the house and the street.

Rear exterior at dusk

This small 4600sf lot is wedged between the heavily wooded Redwood Lodge site west of downtown Mill Valley and larger single-family properties.

At the rear of the house, bleacher-style steps mitigate the steep grade down to the water; the boathouse tucks in on the right.

The housees that circle San Francisco's Buena Vista Park run the gamut from wedding-cake Victorian to Scandinavian modern. Architect Cass Calder Smith aimed to create a façade that contextually relates to the adjacent ornate ones yet is purely modern.

Architect Cass Calder Smith embarked on a gut renovation to join two apartments inside a SoHo building, resulting in a 1,600-square-foot residence. He redid the floors in oak and redesigned the wall of windows that frames views to the east.

Studio BANAA worked with millworker Ralph Lammers, and the millwork is one of the standouts of this design. The curved coffee bar carved out of natural hickory and laser-cut patterned planters contributed to the expressive composition of color, texture, and patterns that complement the brick and metal present in the existing building shell.

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The eponymous founder and principal of Michael K. Chen Architecture resuscitated a four-story, 3,600-square-foot home in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood that was built in 1895 and had been abandoned for 20 years. Its newest owners—a tech investor and an art teacher at a public school—were inspired by the playful color palette that was still apparent underneath the building’s decay. "We had epic color palette meetings, looking at deck after deck for paint colors that spoke to us or provoked a particular sensation,” says Chen. “You don’t look at the color, you inhabit it.”