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A diagram of DH House's prefabricated metal structure.

The 1969 summer house needed a gut remodel—so Carisa Salerno and Aaron Levin rebuilt it piece by piece: “In the end, we feel like we built a sculpture, not a house.”

"It's not close to highways,

The Fish Camp acts as the couple’s forest getaway, just a quarter mile from their main house.

On a rocky bank, Hebra Arquitectos builds a breezy home that opens wide to nature.

The owner was motivated to build his own home to avoid a mortgage and to gain the know-how to undertake his own maintenance and repairs. “I was craving the personal challenge to cultivate a home for myself,” he says. “As it was the beginning of a new adventure, I wanted it to be personal. Also, practically speaking, if I built each piece of the home by hand, I would have a good sense of how to solve problems or improve it, without having to ask anyone else to journey through the forest, down the trail, and up the cliff to make an adjustment.”

Lauren and Brittan Ellingson, the owners of Notice Snowboards, a custom snowboard and wakesurf company in Whitefish, Montana, approached Workaday Design and builder Mindful Designs to concoct a new lake home for their family. The brief was, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on getting the family outdoors as much as possible.

While the owners really liked the idea of shou sugi ban, they opted for a more cost-effective black stain. The random-width, reverse board-and-batten siding reflects the wabi-sabi concept. “The builder said the math for the random siding was torturous,” the wife said. “We didn’t know how hard it was to make things look simple.” DeNiord planted hay-scented fern and lowbush blueberry sod around the house. “We didn't want any side of the house to feel unconsidered,” he says. As for the local boulders he placed around the house and terrace, he says, “They give the feeling that the house grew up around the outcroppings.”

Thompson, a founding principal of Assembledge+, had recently participated in a Los Angeles Magazine project to imagine solutions for those who lack housing in the city. Their notion was for public agencies to subsidize building ADUs in backyards along alleyways, dovetailing with existing alley revitalization initiatives

Perkins & Will designs a mountaintop Passive House that takes energy efficiency to the next level.

Olson Kundig designed the Rolling Huts in Mazama, Washington, for a client who needed space to house visiting friends and family. The huts sit lightly on the site, a former RV campground in an alpine river valley. The huts are sited to capture views of the mountains and not one another.

"Ultimately, we wanted to build something that was sensitive and respectful to the area,

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

Multiple Hytte cabins can be clustered together to create a village layout.

The units are installed on a site in Hurley, New York, overlooking Twin Lakes, and some of them will include private hot tubs.

Architect Will Winkelman and landscape architect Todd Richardson collaborated with client JT Bullitt to design a house that blends into its surroundings in Steuben, Maine. The green roof gives the impression that "the ground just jumped onto the roof," Richardson says.

Cement panels painted a plum hue clad Jason Gordon’s 1,157-square-foot cabin in the Ozark Mountains. Architect German Brun and partner Lizmarie Esparza originally specified wood, but opted for the much less expensive material from James Hardie after contractor Damian Fitzpatrick recommended it. “It was an exercise in cost engineering,” Brun says.