House

The cabins are made up of two layers of wood construction. The exterior layer is made of Larch wood with a custom glazing.

Stinessen placed each cabin carefully in order to ensure the best possible views and the right amount of privacy.

This boutique hotel on Norway's Manshausen Island is made up of four sea cabins—one of which juts out from a natural ledge. Each of them fit two to four travelers or a family of five.

Via Dezeen, photo by Jim Stephenson.

The open plan, high ceilings, and white walls all amplify the light that streams into the living room, accented with a Barcelona Couch by Mies van der Rohe for Knoll and two Blythe Pony Cube ottomans by Gus Design.

Upstairs, the Sands' home feels a world away from the offices and metal shop below. But even downstairs, Larissa says, it's not the whines of the grinders and machine tools that are the loudest but the volume of the radio.

On the second floor, Larissa's office space looks over the workshop via a 20-foot-tall glass-enclosed shaft that lets lights in and accommodates behemoth projects.

The 1940s-era building was scheduled for demolition before the Sands purchased it in the early aughts and transformed it into their workshop, offices, and home. The space was nearly in ruins when the couple bought it and they used recycled or salvaged materials wherever possible in the renovation and even fabricated the metal work in the first-floor shop.

The first floor houses a machine shop--where prototypes for LED lighting and folding glass facades are fabricated for Larissa's architecture office, housed on the second floor along with Jeff's industrial design studio. The third story is the couple's and their seven-year-old daughter's living space, making for an ideal commute.

For all its hard environmental work, one of the most immediate of the Blue Sky Home’s pleasures is how it sits so snugly in its desert surroundings.