Furniture

The east-facing kitchen is the brightest room in the house. A Louis Poulsen lamp sits at one end of the table, which doubles as the couple’s desk. There are no drawers or cabinets, just sliding panels to hide things. “I didn’t want cabinets because, then, what are the hinges? What are the knobs?” David explains. “I wanted to make fewer decisions. It’s about the experience of the space and not the hardware.”

Craig designed the wood desk with benday–like perforations that disperse the sunlight.

For the house’s foundation, Emilie and Seth went with a raised concrete slab on top over wooden piles, which was $39,570. That includes a burnished finish for the ground-floor apartment and the foundation for a detached backyard workshop, some of which was fashioned out of remnants of a dismantled Tulane building. They built the tree house using fence boards and building sills from the original home on the lot.

On the patio sits an outdoor dining set that Jared built using wood salvaged from the original house.

Jared built many of the home’s furnishings by hand—including the bed frames.

The ceiling, busy with light and shadow and bright wooden beams, contrasts with the simplicity below, the concrete floor and the living area's single piece of permanent furniture, the Arflex sofa.

A Paul McCobb-designed, reeded glass panel provides a contemplative backdrop for a walnut Knoll writing desk and Bertoia Side Chair in this home office layout that uses a divider to make clever use of space.

The cave’s art-filled dining room.

“The vibe feels cozy even though the living room is quite grand,” Adler says. He made the room divider out of concrete and integrated the sofa with the step. Lee Jofa fabric covers the dining chairs and the pendants are vintage.

The couple added a coat of black paint and cedar siding to give the home a cleaner, more modern look. "The house already had wide and low eaves, providing protection from the sun, and we added new spray-foam insulation, so the black exterior actually does not pose too much of an issue with the desert heat," she says. A new Cor-Ten steel fence blocks the view of the neighbor's roof, but doesn't interfere with the landscape.

Marine plywood dominates the interior and is especially striking in the compact kitchen and its island's geometric design.

Gregory Katz proves that three times is a charm with his trio of concrete homes, which challenge the status quo in this quiet Johannesburg suburb. The kitchen shines in a bright yellow. Photo by: Elsa Young

Tom’s compact bedroom feels much larger thanks to interlocking shelves and storage. The plywood bed and surrounding shelving were custom-built by Wilkin and a hired carpenter.

The easy-assembly Flip Shelf.

Though Hale spends plenty of time with Edmonds and the twins, he longs for more hours. "The main frustration with the house is all the little projects I still want to complete," he says. "I wish I didn't have to work so I could tinker all day."