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6396 Home Design Ideas and Photos

The interiors of many of Muennig’s houses emphasize natural building materials such

as wood, concrete, and stone. Plant life and nature are intrinsic to the Pfeiffer Ridge House IV.

Olson Kundig designed the Rolling Huts in Mazama, Washington, for a client who needed space to house visiting friends and family. The huts sit lightly on the site, a former RV campground in an alpine river valley. The huts are sited to capture views of the mountains and not one another.

The defining feature of this lakeside cabin in northern Idaho is a 30-by-20-foot window wall that opens the living area to the surrounding lake and forest. Concrete blocks, steel, and plywood make up the simple palette of materials.

Olson Kundig refurbished this 1950s building as a flexible off-site exhibition space for SFMOMA's Project Los Altos in downtown Los Altos, California. The firm replaced the front facade with a double-height, floor-to-ceiling window wall that can be raised or lowered at the whim of the user.

Near the main house, James Turrell’s pyramidal Skyspace structure invites visitors into its dark recess for a chance to view the heavens through a perspective-altering cutout. Most of Murren’s museum-quality art collection is inside the house, including a Robert Rauschenberg piece, a set of Andy Warhol prints, and a hologram by Turrell.

Inside, Kaiser crafted a curved interior that matches the silo's circular footprint. "I didn’t want to cheat and do a box inside a curved shell," he says. "I wanted it to feel like the inside and outside were born of the same mentality." Scrap walnut plank flooring purchased on Craigslist for $350 accounted for most of the interior wood. It's paired with black steel touches. Everything in this room is custom—Kaiser designed the curved-faced cabinets, the dining table, the sofa, and the lamp that has hooks for pots and pans. The countertops are Corian. The Eames Wire Chairs are one of the only non-custom elements.

Debbi Gibbs loved the seeming wilderness of the area, especially considering its relative proximity to her New York apartment. She bought a ramshackle cabin with plans to tear it down and start fresh, then bided her time until she found just the right architects. Enter Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of Resolution: 4 Architecture, who granted her wish for an open prefabricated structure with custom design touches.

A poodle-size dog door is a must for Max, who, as his owner reports, loves the lake house. Blake has also been known to eschew the sliding glass doors in favor of the smaller exit point.

“You can get a really nice cross-breeze,” says Debbi Gibbs of her home, situated to capitalize on its lakefront parcel. “If you open the sliding doors on both sides you really feel like the whole house is open.”

A prefabricated lakeside New Jersey retreat is one woman's outdoorsy counterpoint to city life.

Architect Byoung-soo Cho and his wife, Eunsil Kim, value the privacy, and style,

that a concrete wall and recycled Indonesian teak facade provide.

Visitors enter through a narrow staircase, visible here as a slit to the right of the courtyard.

Earth House is dedicated to Dong-joo Yoon, a Korean poet who died as a political prisoner in Japan during WWII.

A square hole in the ground and a concrete slab are all that demarcate Byoung Cho’s Earth House from the surrounding countryside.

The courtyard offers a glimpse of nature from nearly every angle, including up.

Cho relaxes in the first-floor living room, where paintings by up-and-coming Germany-based Chinese artist Ruo Bing Chen play off a sofa and coffee table designed by the architect himself.

Perched on top of a hill, the house is accessed by a long staircase that runs up to the exterior courtyard. The dogs, naturally, take their own route.

The sliding doors to a deck are by the Canadian company Dynamic Architectural Windows & Doors.

Parson Russell terriers Pepper and Trixie get a glimpse of the large courtyard through a glassy expanse by Marvin Windows and Doors.

Buser and Chapoton blackened the exterior cladding themselves.

Buser designed and made the headboard in the master bedroom from local aspens.

Architects Mayer Sattler-Smith designed the bookshelves and Alvar Aalto the 406 lounge chair for Artek.

Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret designed the LC4 Villa Church lounge for Cassina.

The courtyard with its fire pit and infinity pond—extends the living area outdoors. The family has hosted events, weddings, and even a funeral here, and annual solstice parties are always a big hit with the neighbors.

Martin Buser sharing a quiet moment with his three comrades.

A series of charred modern boxes, the home Petra Sattler-Smith and Klaus Mayer designed for Martin Buser and Kathy Chapoton, is organized around views of the Alaskan landscape.

On Vashon Island, about 20 miles southwest of Seattle, architect Seth Grizzle designed a 440-square-foot multiuse structure for his clients Bill and Ruth True.

The 3,000-square-foot house sits partially on stilts to tread as lightly as possible on its natural island site.

Architect Michelle Linden worked with Brothers to create a minimalist house. Inspired by the inward-looking approach of Cistercian abbeys, Linden oriented the U-shaped structure around a courtyard.

Anna Hoover, founder of the non-profit First Light Alaska, sought a "thought refuge, a room with a view to sit and contemplate future projects and reflect on recent travels and interactions, plenty of ‘headspace’—tall ceilings—and the ability to host other artists for studio time," she says. A longtime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Hoover was familiar with the work of Olson Kundig and contacted the Seattle-based firm to design her abode.

Updating the A-frame of yore, this home’s liberal use of windows makes the most of panoramic views spanning two valleys. Catalonia, Spain. Cadaval & Sola-Morales from the book Rock the Shack, Copyright Gestalten 2013.

The charred cedar exterior gently basks in the Alaskan sun.

The facade is clad with beveled siding, stained dark to meld into the forest.

Estate Bungalow in Matugama, Sri Lanka, by Narein Perera as published in Cabins (Taschen, 2014).

Sebastian Heise’s wooden structure, seemingly atilt, overlooks a green valley in Oberwiesenthal, Germany. The two horizontal windows on the side and the front porch give the home its own unique sense of balance.

A shed provides storage for the owners’ tools as well as wood for the fireplace. It features the same aged pine finish as the main home.

Building atop the foundation of a previous greenhouse was a cost-cutting measure; it allowed the project to be considered a renovation and thereby qualify for a temporary tax reduction. Its traditional, gabled form also pays homage to the original structure.

Jaanus Orgusaar's NOA cabin in the Virumaa region of northeast Estonia. The structure rests on three feet, so it doesn't require a foundation.

The House for a Musher is all about taking advantage of its hilltop site. The courtyard in the front has vast views and the house itself is oriented toward the surrounding landscape.

Set in the lush Wisconsin forest, this neatly stacked cabin was built vertically in order to minimize the amount of grading and landscaping necessary for construction. Photo by: Narayan Mahon

The facade consists of exposed concrete, Galvalume roofing, and cedar or torrefied wood coating. The homes are carefully positioned to keep other structures out of sight.

Though the retreat is clearly meant to afford the solitude writing so often requires, Kathleen reports that "it's very lively. Deer approach, birds bathe. The sun warms my desk and you can hear the rain."

Cho’s recently completed vacation retreat, the Concrete Box House, was inspired by the use of raw materials. Cho decided on grape vines as an unusual landscape element.

Wood from the property’s felled trees was incorporated into every room in the 3,000-square-foot house.

Construction during Lake Tahoe’s snowy season posed the biggest building challenge. “We shrink-wrapped the building, so the contractor could continue working through the cold of winter, sparing the expense of continuous snow removal, and limiting traces of the process on the landscape. Snowmobiles and sledges were used to bring workers and construction materials to the site.” Casper says.

This dwelling joins a number of structures—such as a boathouse and guesthouse—owned by one family and used for vacations. They needed a new house to accommodate new generations at the reatreat.

“From the street, it appears as a rectangular building with sloping shed roofs, but this is actually an illusion,” Hutchison notes. “The floor plan is actually U-shaped, wrapping around an entry courtyard that is contained by the continuous west facade.” A standing seam metal roof by Custom Bilt Metals blends in with the cedar siding.

A shark-skinning shack.

“This was really a parameter-driven project,” explains Lukasz Kos, a Toronto-based designer and cofounder of the architecture firm Testroom. “That is, I had to let the trees decide how the tree house would be.”

What the trees decided, apparently, was that they wanted a gracefully slender, Blade Runner–like elevator lodged between them. They also decided they didn’t want to be too mutilated in the process. Kos responded to their needs with the low-impact 4Treehouse, a lattice-frame structure that levitates above the forest floor of Lake Muskoka, Ontario, under the spell of some witchy architectural magic.

He created this effect by suspending the two-ton, 410-square-foot tree house 20 feet above the ground with steel airline cables. With only one puncture hole in each of the four trunks into which the cable is anchored, the trees get away almost entirely unscathed, and the structure attains the visual effect of being suspended weightlessly in midair.

At the base of the tree, a staircase rolls on casters upon two stone slabs, allowing occupants to enter and exit regardless of how much the tree house may be swaying or rocking in the wind. Solid plywood walls punctuated by a floor of red

PVC constitute the “opaque” base story, which is largely protected from the outside elements. “The idea was to have the tree house open up as it gained elevation,” explains Kos. The second story is surrounded by a vertical lattice frame, allowing for breezes, air, and light to filter softly through walls while still establishing a visual perimeter between outside and inside space. At top, the tree house is completely penned in, a suspended patio with a ceiling of sky. br> br>Photo by Lukasz Kos.

In the land of large mountain lodge wannabes, two California natives tuck Utah’s first LEED for Homes–rated house onto the side of Emigration Canyon. Photo by Dustin Aksland

Poteet describes the space as “unbearably hot” before he used spray-foam insulation between the exterior walls and the interior bamboo. “Now it’s the equivalent of a steel ice chest,” he says.

In the winter, instead of floating over the pond, the hut sits lightly above the snow. "It's protected and serene but alive with subtle energy," Poss says. Photo by Phillip Kalantzis-Cope.

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The solar panels on the roof often get covered in a heavy layer of snow, but with periodic clearing, they are as effective during the sunny days of winter as they are during fairer weather.

A wooden home nestled amongst a cluster of Japanese larch trees offers a perfect sanctuary from nearby Tokyo. Chubu, Japan. By Koji Tsutsui & Associates from the book Rock the Shack, Copyright Gestalten 2013.

The steel-clad Rolling Huts designed by Olson Kundig Architects in Manzama, Washington, sit lightly on the land thanks to wheels that allow the tiny residences to "hover" above the site, optimizing views of the landscape. Photo by Derek Pirozzi.

HotBox: Michaela MacLeod and Nicholas Croft (Toronto)

A mysterious monolith on the landscape, this warming hut, a cubic room wrapped in rubber and egg shell crate foam, provides a space for socialization.

Rolling Huts by Olson Kundig

There are a lot reasons to follow Olson Kundig on Instagram. One of them is their seminal Rolling Huts project.

A Rolling Hut. Photo by Tim Bies, Olson Kundig Architects.

Cedar slats mark the facade of Floating House, Doug and Becca Worple's lake house in Ontario. The architects, MOS, chose materials and shapes that wouldn’t stand out. “They’re really simple, almost Platonic forms,” principal Michael Meredith says. The modest cabin has boat, a gabled roof and a cladding of untreated cedar, a material that shows up on docks and homes along Georgian Bay. “Allowing the buildings to weather seems the right thing to do,” Sample says. And it’s ready for winter: Sliding barn doors seal the place up as an impenetrable box.

The father of architect Greg Dutton wished to build a cabin on the family farm, located within Appalachian Ohio and home to 400 heads of cattle. Dutton, of Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio-based Midland Architecture, presented this design as his father’s birthday present in 2012. Finished in 2014, the 900-square-foot cabin operates entirely off-the-grid.

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