Future Home - Exterior

"We did our best to tuck the buildings into the site—the goal was to get up high on a perch. It was a matter of setting that elevation and working back down with the topography," says architectural designer Riley Pratt.

When the shutters are closed, the house assumes an introverted character.

Rahman did her own landscaping in the garden outside her house. The cedar fence was made with planks that were charred and sealed following the ancient Japanese shou sugi ban technique, which is supposed to make the wood resistant to fire, rot, and insects.

Inexpensive but sturdy James Hardie lap siding was used on the exterior.

Scott Pitek designed this gabled structure for Betty Rahman on a 5,000-square-foot lot in Portland, Oregon.

Residents enter the house from the street through the upper level, which contains the bedrooms. The rafters were removed to create additional loft space.

Architect Sven Matt mixed basic shapes with rich details in this Austrian home. The lattice shell was hewn from silver fir sourced from a nearby forest. Eternit shingles clad the roof.

Detail

Dining Porch Flanked by Living and Bedroom Volumes

Master Bedroom Volume

Back Approach / View From Lake Michigan

Entry Landscape

Entry Landscape

Front Approach

The house's "traditional" feel, Koolhaas says, is "only as thick as the layer of wood on the outside." When entering, the eyes travel straight back through the massive windows to the green yard beyond. "It appears as though there is no house behind the facade, like the houses on a movie set," he says.

Geoff and Joanna Mouming’s compact modern farmhouse is the first permanent structure at Yum Yum Farm in Wellman, Iowa. On the field that stretches out before it, organic vegetables will soon make attentive farmers of the Moumings. The benches on their entry porch were built by Geoff using a design plan by Aldo Leopold, the pioneering Iowa-born conservationist and writer whose spirit and thoughts seem to preside over the house.

Though the house is sleekly modern—some visitors unaccustomed to contemporary architecture have said it looks like a spaceship—there are winks to old-time Americana throughout the property.

The architect chose granite for the house’s base, zinc for its roof, and Scandinavian pinewood for cladding—all materials that complement the nearby gray stone building.