Smart Live-Work Spaces

With a sizable portfolio packed with innovative home, restaurant, retail, and office design, Cara Cummins and Jose Tavel of TaC Studios took their strategies for their clients to their own home. When choosing a site, the dynamic duo felt passionate about staying in the neighborhood they were so dedicated to help transform—a central, historic Atlanta community once tainted by its industrial past and years of street crime.

Monkman’s house has a quiet presence, its front half hidden behind a fence of cedar two-by-sixes.

With broad expanses of white walls and perfectly modulated light, this space is the very picture of an artist’s studio—and it was crafted as carefully as Monkman’s mountain landscape.

With the help of architect Bart Lens, Veerle Wenes and Bob Christiaens merged a 19th-century building with a 1970s one to create a combined home and art gallery in Antwerp. In the dining room downstairs, Wenes entertains family, friends, and gallery visitors. The yellow chair is by Jens Fager.

Images by Raw Color hang in a room upstairs.

A palette of wood, concrete, and painted brick forms a neutral backdrop for Kathryn Tyler’s vintage treasures, including a $30 dining table, $3 poster, and a set of 1950s Carl Jacobs Jason chairs she snagged on eBay for $400. Read more about this frugal furniture collector here.

Clerestory windows in Tyler's design studio provide plenty of light, while built-in bookshelves and flat files offer ample storage.

When he became the dean of Syracuse University's School of Architecture in 2004, Mark Robbins made a plan to help the city and, potentially, the entire country. “I wanted to see if we could build houses that simultaneously made propositions about sustainability and about the possibility of constructing houses in a city like Syracuse,” Robbins said. The result was three green homes for $200,000 each and the promise of more to come. Read more about the central New York project here.

A stack of the artist's work sits in his live/work space's front window.