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Keep founders Austin and Kotono Watanabe revived a compact home in Minneapolis with a dazzling kitchen, an all-electric upgrade, and a clerestory “scoop.”

A see-through entry hall joins the living areas with a bedroom wing.

"It only cost about $48,000 to build, which was incredibly cheap," says Turner of the Stealth Barn. "We got the Timber Frame Company to supply the shell, then we clad it and fitted out the interior and windows ourselves. The idea was to take the archetypal black tar-painted agricultural building and make an almost childlike icon of that."

The black paint on the exterior timber cladding is similar to “falu red”, a permeable red paint commonly used on wooden cottages and barns in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The paint consists of water, rye flour, linseed oil, silicates, iron oxides, copper compounds, and zinc. When it is time to repaint the house, the old paint is simply brushed or scrubbed away.

“We pulled apart one volume and staggered it along the buildable area of the property,” says architect Matthew Ahlberg of Portland firm Barrett Made. The home is clad in unfinished cedar, meant to weather over time.

This tiny not-home home is a floating sauna built by lighting designer Brendan Ravenhill. Most of the year, Brendan is in Los Angeles, but when he returns to his family’s homestead on Little Cranberry Island, a short boat ride southeast of Acadia National Park, he tends to personal projects like this little floating sauna -

Exterior in the winter

Floor Plan of Tall House by Tall Architects

Loon Lake Retreat site plan

Columbus, Indiana, resident Nick Slabaugh tasked Chicago architect Grant Gibson with creating a low-cost home on a small lot near the city’s downtown. Its design references local architectural landmarks. Gibson says the building’s "low profile with a bulging roof element

Some windows that were salvageable were kept, while others were replaced with new Jeld-Wen units that Jocie liked better for their size, shape, or function. At the corner of the sunroom, for example, an angular corner window looks much cleaner than the two units that had been there before.

White windows and trim match the fences and provide a pop of contrast against the natural materials.

Floor plan of Lake Pepin Farmhouse by TEA2 Architects

The home sits at the end of a quiet, gravel road just 325-yards from the ocean. A board-formed concrete wall along the entry path hints at what is indoors.