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The living room is furnished with vintage items, including a leather-and-chrome chair by Suekichi Uchida and a stacking stool by Florence Knoll.

A window on the new upper floor looks out to the city.

Though the views of the lush forest are the stars of the show here, Patnaik's art collection has a presence here too, including a diptych by Kokil Gupta that hangs above a low-slung grey sofa.

The light coming in through the handrail and skylight.

Master bedroom

Sleeping Room

The interior finishes in the bedroom and adjacent bathroom are similar to those on the main floor: birch plywood, concrete, and neutral tones.

Halfway through a pregnancy isn’t exactly the ideal time to buy a house. So after spending months scouting San Francisco’s Victorians and turnkey cookie-cutters—and almost defecting to the East Bay—Lorena Siminovich and Esteban Kerner decided to put the hunt on hold until after their baby was born. But then one afternoon Kerner, a design director with Old Navy, logged on to Craigslist on a whim. He saw a below-market listing for a single-family home in Noe Valley, their neighborhood of choice. With crumbly brick cladding, peeling rust-brown paint, and rotting garage doors, the house lacked curb appeal. But the Argentine couple was drawn to the interior. "It was amazing and strange at the same time," says Kerner of the 1,485-square-foot, multilevel, midcentury maze. "Mind-boggling," adds Siminovich. "It was just a knot of doors and a series of insane stairs to nowhere."

Crestwood Hills, in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, is an endangered enclave of midcentury post-and-beam houses designed by A. Quincy Jones and Whitney R. Smith.

After being buried under layers of haphazard renovations, a 1959 Seattle ranch finally reaches its maximum potential.