Paint Jobs

Columbus, Indiana, resident Nick Slabaugh tasked Chicago architect Grant Gibson with creating a low-cost home on a small lot near the city’s downtown. Its design references local architectural landmarks. Gibson says the building’s “low profile with a bulging roof element” recalls Eero Saarinen’s Irwin Union Bank, while the half-buried volume “is similar to Gunnar Birkerts’s Lincoln Elementary School.”

24d-studio separate work and read nook off the main work space

The bright orange tone of the front door matches the color of the accent wall in the living room, connecting the exterior and the interior of the ADU.

Deep-set windows and skylights ushers in plenty of natural light that spans throughout, all while further enhancing the bright surrounding hues.

Ben Allen renovated this old Victorian in London using a rainbow of colored concrete. One of the new bathrooms is cast in mossy green with an arch motif that appears throughout the home.

Light enters the kitchen from the courtyard through one of the glass doors.

Pastel blue tile and Driklolor paint in the soft, pink Pillow hue add a touch of playfulness to the kid’s bathroom. A Flower Pot pendant light from Verner Panton hangs above the round mirror and wall-mount faucet.

Espen Handegård of Handegård Arkitektur imagined for a young couple on the waterfront in Norway.

"How would a kid draw a house?" architect Per Franson asked himself when designing the Olivero-Reinius family home. The simple prefab structure’s unusual color comes from a traditional source: falu rödfärg, the historic mineral paint that gives the region’s famous barns their red color.

The guest bathroom.

With a new baby on the way and the soon-to-be grandmother moving in, Seattleites Ilga Paskovskis and Kyle Parmentier asked Best Practice Architecture to expand their detached garage into a 570-square-foot ADU, which they now call the Granny Pad. “We can see the joy it brings Grandma when the baby comes over to visit,” says Kyle. “It’s the best part of her day.”

Jonathan Tate, principal at the New Orleans design firm Office of Jonathan Tate, launched the Starter Home program to build middle-class homes in increasingly expensive parts of the city. One single-family home by the firm is part of a duo that riffs on traditional New Orleans shotgun houses.

Inside the house, a relatively new Rais wood-burning stove is next to a Risom Rocker from Design Within Reach, a 2009 piece from the designer.