Window seats

For Gabriel Ramirez and his partner Sarah Mason Williams, following the Sea Ranch rules—local covenants guide new designs—didn’t mean slipping into Sea Ranch clichés. The architects love Cor-Ten steel, with its ruddy and almost organic surface, and they made it the main exterior material, along with board-formed concrete and ipe wood. The Cor-Ten, which quickly turned an autumnal rust in the sea air, and the concrete, with its grain and crannies, mean the house isn’t a pristine box, Ramirez says. His Neutra house “was very crisp and clean,” he says. “This house is more distressed, more wabi-sabi.”

Prerak and Krina wanted to be able to open the room to guests when hosting parties, so the window installation functions as both storage and additional seating.

After: The soaring new living and dining space benefits from an abundance of natural light from every side, and they spent a lot of time trying to find the best lighting for the kitchen. The final choice: long, narrow copper pendants from Denmark suspended by ultra thin wires to not disrupt the visual flow of the room.

The reading nook is surrounded by storage designed to accommodate specific items. The tall cupboard, for example, houses an ironing board and ladder. "The shapes are not just arbitrary,

The original owners made the shoji panels themselves, and John and Erik replaced the rice paper. “There’s something special about knowing the screens were made by hand,” Erik says.

In the new living room, the floors are covered in pine wood with a Bona Craft Oil finish in Frost, and the walls and ceiling are coated in lime plaster, Mortex by Beal. The handmade hanging chair, made of plaster, is a favorite spot for the couple’s cat, Paka.

A Danish artist filled the wooden wonder with handcrafted details and hygge vibes—and it comes with a studio and a tree house.

The dining table was custom built from walnut by furniture maker John Lightfoot Greiner.

A dark green Lacanche range is backed by 18th-century English reproduction tiles hand-painted in Portugal.

The kitchen was completely remade with custom cabinetry and counters. "We weren't really sure what we wanted in the kitchen, so my dad had an idea to build us a kitchen out of cardboard with an island and everything. Aaron and I are visual people so we needed to see it at scale to decide,

Designed by Arba, the retreat’s enclosed garden provides outdoor space out of the wind while the cuts give it a strong connection with the setting.

The former laundry space was refashioned into a windowside booth, its built-in shelves, walls and ceilings painted red. It's become popular with kids and visitors.

The cozy, 323-square-foot cabin is a cozy retreat amidst the vast landscape it inhabits.

Furniture designer Tom Deacon teamed up with pal and architect Andrew Jones to renovate his Toronto townhouse. “Architects tend to think of the building first, the interiors second, and last, the furniture. Our approach was the opposite,” Jones says.