Inspiration

Rusty House

Dawnsknoll’s exterior sidings are cement panels and Resysta wood. The house’s front gate and garage are made from recycled wood.

The architects replaced the original, carpeted stairway with one built from black walnut. “[The goal] was to mirror a large tree that had to be felled in the garden before the project started,” Webster explains. “The staircase rises up through the building, with the branches being the landings that reach out to the different rooms.” Tom Dixon lights hang at the center of the stairs.

A pair of Molded Plywood lounge chairs by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller sit opposite a BoConcept coffee table and a sofa of Paul’s design. For his father’s book collection, Paul created a library around the double-height staircase.

main elevation

In Lac Supérieur, outside Montreal, the Fraternité-sur-Lac resort site is home to a series of modern, modular residences designed by YH2.

The dining table, made from a single piece of teak, is a little over 13 feet long and was custom made for the space. It can seat up to 24.

Gregory and Caryn Katz are dwarfed beneath the cantilevered concrete overhang, which houses the bedroom on the upper level. The stackable glass doors that run beneath allow the house to open completely to the yard and swimming pool, soften the severity of the concrete, and blur the boundary between indoors and out.

Protected by an overhang, and floating above ground level, this tertiary space is known in traditional homes as the "engawa." To sustain a unified look throughout, the floor and ceiling are clad in ipe wood.

Shophouses are a staple of Southeast Asian urban architecture. A team of designers including Yong Ter, Teng Wui, Andrew Lee, and Edwin Foo renovated this shophouse into a contemporary sanctuary over the course of two years. They left the roof completely open from the beginning of the original airshaft to the back of the house. The heart is a cooking/dining area with a 13-foot-long Indonesian table made from a single piece of teak.

A couple—he an entrepreneur working in logistics, she a stay-at-home mother—bought an 8,500-square-foot house here and approached JSa, a Mexico City-based architectural firm, with the idea of remodeling it. The house was poorly sited on its lot in a manner that drew very little natural light. The architects sized it up and quickly realized that the best solution would be to tear it down and start from scratch.

The rear of the house looks onto a lush backyard. The rough, industrial prefabricated concrete panels by the German manufacturer Syspro are the building blocks of the home.

Langston-Jones, who grew up in Malaysia and Hong Kong, was attracted to corrugated metal for its its unique edges and visible flecks of material. He left the original 1920s corrugated steel roof and filled the interior with panes of the same material, as well as walls of sanded concrete and a concrete slab. “Inside and outside, there’s only one set of finishes, which succeeds in drawing the outside inside,” he says. “The climate here is wonderful, you can virtually live outside.”