Landscape

The office also offers a serene view of the new atrium.

A Karimoku case study chair with ottoman provides a spot to sit between the living room and reading nook.

The reading nook corridor has a sizeable sliding glass door that pockets into more glass, with thresholds flush between the cork floors on the interior and the large format porcelain tile on the exterior. The center of the atrium is filled with raked 1/8” Desert Gold crushed granite.

New living spaces now provide enclosure to create a 400-square-foot, open-air atrium at the center of the home.

"My goal was to carry on the client’s family legacy by creating a very special place that took inspiration from the landscape,” explains architect Tom Kundig.

Nestled in the woods two hours east of Minneapolis, Off-Grid Inn, Unit 2, one of a pair of rental cabins designed by Danny Lindstrom and built with his friend and business partner, Duff Davidson, combines simplicity with unexpected, offbeat elements like a neon-yellow handrail, an oversize stairway, and changeable lighting.

Inspired by the fence from the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Greg and Kirsten chose local basalt for the new privacy wall.

“The idea was to create this total openness and informality and almost undomesticated domestic space,” says Leven. The concrete is textured by its forms on the outside but smooth where it cuts into the building—“almost as though you sliced into it with a knife,” adds the designer.

Stepping into the guesthouse’s hot tub brings the eye to ground level, providing a new vantage on landscape designer Marc Peter Keane’s mix of Japanese greenery and native mosses. “We minimized visual cues from the house so that when you’re experiencing it, you’re not thinking about the building, you’re just in life. The reduction of signals creates tranquility,” says Andrew.

A window in one of the bedrooms frames a view of the garden. The wallpaper is from Superflower, a company run by the couple. It uses Andrew’s images of flowers, which Niki says have a beauty in their “formal and objective” quality, adding depth to traditional patterns.