House of the Week

The front facade, covered in Minerit HD fiber cement panels, is muted save for a bright-green entrance ramp and red door. The entire project came in at about $225 per square foot.

“The steep site lends itself to the ‘upside down’ configuration,” Harkness explains. “It certainly wouldn’t work as well if you could only access the house via the lower level, as this is through the bedroom zone, so we included two entrances. The upper one involves walking across a little bridge.”

Desiring a home in a natural setting for their three sons, ages 5, 9, and 10, architects Katie and Danny MacNelly built a three-volume residence near Virginia’s James River. With a focus on outdoor social spaces, Katie likens the overall program to “loose coals around a campfire.”

A prefabricated lakeside New Jersey retreat is one woman's outdoorsy counterpoint to city life.

This Carlsbad home has a tertiary space that space is known in traditional Japanese homes as the "engawa.” To sustain a unified look throughout, the floor and ceiling are clad in ipe wood. Photo by Daniel Hennessy.

Built to go off the grid, this remote beachside cottage can open up completely to the outdoors with its series of movable wall-sized glass panels and screens. Designed by Herbst Architects, the modest New Zealand bach comprises two rectangular pavilions built with mostly natural materials chosen for their durability, texture, and weathering characteristics.

The 1,668-square-foot three-bedroom home is made of four colorful, crisscrossed containers equipped with a simple ventilation system that facilitates a constant breeze.

“The idea was to highlight the raw materials discovered during demolition,” Goneau said. Steelwood Chairs by Magis sit under a translucent FL/Y lamp by Kartell in the dining room.

The 13-foot-wide sliding window provides abundant natural light year-round. The staircase was placed at the building's center to maximize openness and make space for the carport below. The blackboard is for the couple's young son, Takuma, to play with and practice writing.

Cubicco’s prefab houses, like the Cabana Beach model, are built with laminated veneer lumber, an engineered material that uses up to 90 percent of a tree—compared to typical wood timbers that use only 60 to 70 percent. Modules can be disassembled if the owners relocate.

The Sonoma County home of Lars Richardson and Laila Carlsen is the result of a long-running collaboration with architect Casper Mork-Ulnes. A 713-square-foot indoor-outdoor Shotcrete dining pavilion dubbed the Amoeba provides a loose counterpoint to the more rigid barn structure behind it.

To install Charles Willson’s prefab house, Stillwater Dwellings lifted the structure over an existing barn on the one-acre property. Willson, who is often on the road, wired the house with the latest in smart technology.

The new floor plan maximizes social areas and minimizes sleeping spaces through the creation of “micro” bedrooms that fit a single bed. The rooms were sectioned off with full-height, pine plywood joinery — a nod to Shigeru Ban’s Furniture House. Sliding doors reminiscent of Japanese Shoji screens can be drawn closed for intimacy or opened to extend the visual space.

The roof of this residence was made from scraps taken from the sides of the shipping containers. Its slanted design creates a wind tower effect that provides natural ventilation and negates the need for air-conditioning.

Sky-high ceilings are created by a sculptural pitched roof. Its uneven angles are the result of the required setback distances from surrounding roads and houses.

The downstairs area is floored in polished concrete, and flanked on the north side by huge full-height windows through which passive heat is gathered. The majority of the winter heating, however, is from a ground source heat pump that uses the latent energy in the earth — a relatively new solution in New Zealand.

Steve Conine, a software engineer, installed and programmed many of the details himself, like the Dell UltraSharp flat-screen panels inlaid into the entryway of the home.

Sliding doors from Western Window Systems connect the living room and the deck, which is made of pressure-treated pine planks surrounding a black gravel pit.