Lit Up Homes in the Evening

Cabaña. Pool exterior using Paul's Flower Tile.

Gesner’s house for John Scantlin,1965, highlighting the structure of the single ridge beam, and its lateral rib-like beams, rising up and out toward the view. Photo by Juergen Nogai

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.

“It didn’t bother me to do a house with a lot of things half the size of what people think is normal,” John Picard says of his half-lot home (above) in Manhattan Beach. The home’s steel frame offers a maximum expanse of glass. Because of the small footprint, Picard wanted every inch of the living space to be usable—which is made possible by the steel frame and a service core that runs the entire height of the building.

Don’t let its traditional silhouette fool you: this home features a grid-tied solar photovoltaic array just south of the property, which supplies the family’s annual average powers usage. Large steel beams and columns flank the patio, framing views of the landscape.

The Clark family residence in Raleigh, North Carolina, was designed around the Series 600 multi-slide window walls from Western Window Systems, a rarity in the southeast.