Favorites

The interior staircase of the original 1925 townhouse was restored to serve as an entrance to all the apartments in the complex.

Traditional Pacific fales (thatched huts) and whares (Māori houses) inspired this A-frame bach by RTA Studio that appears as a floating prism. The compact, off-grid home features a communal living space on the ground floor, and three bedrooms in the attic, each with views of the ocean or the bush. Thanks to the sloping site, the residents are even able to store a boat beneath the floorboards.

Pink hexagonal tiles line the walls and floor in the bathroom, which has a large glass shower.

The bathroom features timber cabinetry and a natural-stone floor, which echoes the material palette used throughout the rest of the home.

Think about proportion and size. For instance, are you swapping out your old one because it’s too small? Are you planning to install a new vanity in a tiny powder room and need to find something small enough that would fit?

Since the couple think of the addition as an “extrusion,” they “carried that theme to the rest of the house with the vertical fixtures on the stair and the vertical slats in the bathroom vanity,” says Jason. The marble sink basins are from Stone Forest. The custom shape of the mirror swirls around lights from Rich Willing and Brilliant. Faucets from Rejuvenation are mounted on white oak backplates inset into the slats.

After: The bathroom was divided into a powder room and primary bath, which features Ann Sacks tile in a geometric Kelly Wearstler pattern on the floor. "I'm not one to put tile in a niche,

The Japanese bathroom has an onset, which looks out to greenery framed by timber portals.

The courtyard extends the sense of space in the main bathroom, and although the latter is in a central location in the narrow building, the courtyard brings in that much more light than is typical in a floorplan like this. The floor tile is the Krista Watterworth Kiss Marble ’ tile, and the owners can also open the exterior door there should they want to shower al-fresco.

Lisbon firm Aurora Arquitectos and local studio FURO collaborated on the renovation of an 18th-century structure in Vila Real de Santo António, a city in Portugal’s southern Algarve region.