Collection by Matthew Keeshin
Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. "I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture," she says.
Brooklyn architect Tim Seggerman designed and built what he calls a “crafted jewel box”. Utilizing the petite space in his New York apartment Seggerman creates an enveloping cabin of blond woods.
An enthusiastic cook, Miller says she can easily work in the galley-style kitchen. The reclaimed-wood surround echoes the exterior cladding.
Architect Tom Kundig’s assignment was simple enough: Build a tiny, Thoreau-like getaway for an Atlanta-based writer who owned ten acres on San Juan Island in Puget Sound. "The idea was not to clutter anybody’s thinking, especially a writer’s," he said. So he designed a 500-square-foot retreat that’s both womblike and open to its surroundings.
Completed in 2009, the E.D.G.E comprises two modules that contain the mechanical areas (including the kitchen and bathroom) joined together with walls of glass and white oak panels.
When the Ferguson Sauder family—parents Meg, a school counselor, and Tim, a design instructor, plus kids Cole, Olive, and Asher—wanted a multifunctional backyard addition, they decided to build it themselves. Two Liftoff chairs by Tim Miller, one of Tim’s former students, surround an oil-drum fire pit set in granite dug up on the property. On the deck, the Panamericana chair is by Industry of All Nations.
Though diminutive in size, Jerome A. Levin’s backyard structure has lofty ambitions. “I wanted to create a place that feels like it has no connection to the world it stems from,” Levin says. Photo by Dustin Cohen.
The Leaf House is a lightweight, mobile trailer that was carefully engineered to weigh less than 5,000 pounds. The designer, Laird Herbert, used a metal-mesh, open-joint rainscreen as the cladding on the front end, and spruce pine at the back.
Architect Bruno Despierre built a deck for outdoor activities from pine wood.