Mi Casa Fresca

The lounge deck at the rear yard of Sunset Hills Residence features a swimming pool surrounded by lush gardens. Architect Hsu McCullough's design beautifully merges minimalism with an abundance of nature.

The couple and their friends spent hours clearing brush and felling at-risk oak and madrone trees. “There was no view at all,” Molly says. “You had to duck and peek through thick oak brush just to see that there was anything on the horizon.”

Carstensen painted the body and exterior trim on the garage the same color, in order to "make the house look slightly more modern, without losing character," he said. The color is a discontinued shade, called Evening Canyon, from Behr, that he had mixed at Home Depot. "I tried so many before landing on this one," he said. "This one ended up being my favorite, because it maintains a nice warm tone all throughout the day. Others would end up either looking too cool (almost navy blue) in direct sunlight, or just look brown."

One of the furniture lines for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair was designed by Gilbert Rohde, the company's first in-house modernist designer (previously, the company produced more traditional furniture lines). The series was based on his "grouping principle" that made storage and dresser units all the same shape and height so that they could be concentrated uniformly on a single wall. At the time, traditional dressers provided different shapes and sizes for men and women, so this was a marked contrast and ended up catapulting the company onto the world stage. (No. 3319 Group bedroom chests displayed in the Design for Living House, 1933, Century of Progress exposition, Chicago World’s Fair.)

A long counter height island separates guests from kitchen.

Jessica Helgerson Interior Design, with project manager and lead designer Emily Kudsen Leland at the helm, remade a Portland abode with a crisp paint palette: Benjamin Moore’s Wrought Iron for the cladding and Venetian Gold for the front door. The home was originally designed by Saul Zaik in Southwest Portland, complete with a wood-clad exterior, in 1956. As part of the renovation, landscape design was completed by Lilyvilla Gardens.

The result is a bright, Portuguese home designed in a clean, formal style, where contemporary interiors exist in harmony with the house’s historical shell.

Located in Sands Point, New York, the Free Float Pool House by The UP Studio creates spaces for relaxing by the pool and entertaining with views to the Long Island Sound.

Spanning a mere 11 feet, this Brooklyn row house known as Little House, Big City has been strategically transformed to accommodate the needs of a young family of four.

Simon Knight Architects turns a historic building into a contemporary family home by sprucing up its exterior and rejiggering the ground floor.

Architect David Hill, his wife, Elizabeth, and their three children (from left: Wade, eight, Luke, six, and Breyton, ten), have an unusual home by the standards of their college-town setting in Auburn, Alabama. Built in 1920, the industrial brick building has had previous incarnations as a church, a recycling center, and a pool hall, among others.

Siding is Hardi-Panel board and batten. The ceiling is rift oak.

The desert-chic property is a luxury no-kids-allowed getaway with a private club-like feel. The top-notch design helped earn the property it's a spot as a recent member of Leading Hotels of the World.

dasMOD took care in their landscaping plan by designing around an existing tree, a vestige of the previous landscape and the relationship shared between residence and site providing a warmth with seamless flow from the inside to the outside.