SubscribeSign In
All Photos/exterior/building type : beach house/building type : house

Exterior Beach House House Design Photos and Ideas

The duo recently moved to Australia from Barcelona, and they drew inspiration from Spanish-style plazas for the home’s backyard.
The house is partially off-grid, with all water collected on site and all sewage treated and disposed of on site.
Arriving at the cabin is now a joyous ritual. “Every time we push the gates back and see the view it’s this sense of ‘we’ve arrived’,” Matt says.
After finding paradise on a Hawaiian papaya farm, filmmaker Jess Bianchi and jewelry designer Malia Grace Mau tapped San Francisco artist Jay Nelson to design and build their dream home in just five weeks. Located just one block from the beach, the home takes inspiration from laid-back surf shacks and is mainly built with reclaimed wood.
Fed up with flashy, environmentally insensitive beach homes, architect Gerald Parsonson and his wife, Kate, designed a humble hideaway nestled behind sand dunes along the New Zealand coastline. Crafted in the image of a modest Kiwi bach, their 1,670-square-foot retreat consists of a group of small buildings clad in black-stained pine weatherboards and fiber-cement sheets.
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.
At dawn
The holiday home is nestled into a narrow site in Buffalo Bay, a small beachside town near Buffelsbaai, with a Milkwood forest to the rear and the ocean to the front. The two living levels sit above a large garage/storage area on the lower ground floor and open completely out to the views.
Lauren and Brittan Ellingson, the owners of Notice Snowboards, a custom snowboard and wakesurf company in Whitefish, Montana, approached Workaday Design and builder Mindful Designs to concoct a new lake home for their family. The brief was, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on getting the family outdoors as much as possible.
The firm completely reorganized the interior floorplan and added 750 square feet in a 2019 remodel. The remodel took the scale and massing of the neighboring buildings into consideration.
Wild bush, sand dunes, and scrub surround the circular home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. The Austin Maynard Architects team was careful to minimize the building’s impact on the fragile landscape.
The new cedar will age naturally, gaining a silver patina over time. The garage was refaced with stucco.
Some windows that were salvageable were kept, while others were replaced with new Jeld-Wen units that Jocie liked better for their size, shape, or function. At the corner of the sunroom, for example, an angular corner window looks much cleaner than the two units that had been there before.
The architect streamlined the exterior by replacing the shingles with tongue-and-groove Eastern white cedar boards, grown and milled in Maine.
Cutouts at the roofline demarcate the decks.
The design team treated the cedar siding with a product to give it a silvery patina that suited the neighborhood context, and anodized aluminum windows and doors match the standing-seam roof. “The design captures the spirit of this eclectic and evolving neighborhood, exhibiting both contemporary clean and straight lines but also a gable roof and cedar siding reminiscent of a traditional cottage feeling and material—something to reclaim the beachy character of the neighborhood,” says Saez Pedraja.
The front courtyard extends the living space off the kitchen, and connects the home to the neighborhood.
Saez Pedraja Architecture designed a two-bedroom, 1,600-square-foot home on a narrow city lot in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica.
"By replacing the low-value, original garage and workshop, space was created within the original building envelope to create a three-bed, one-bath guest wing above," says DFJ Architects. This new wing is on the same level as the main residence and "is keyed into the existing roof pitch," so it fits seamlessly into the neighborhood.
“An angled entry clad in white brick addresses the angle of the street and provides a place to pause before entering into the home,” says the firm.
The exposed concrete framework cantilevers dramatically from the stone walls.
"In a sense, we treated earth as one of our materials," says Vaitsos. "We figured out how much earth we needed to excavate in order to position this house here. And then we used it to transform the landscape a little bit." This was done to create as little waste as possible.
Each cell denotes a different area inside the house below it and is planted with a different species of aromatic plant from which essential oils can be extracted. The landscaped roof also helps to insulate the home and blend it into the environment.
The circular insertions are custom operable skylights that allow for daylighting and passive cooling.
The Orchard Corral is just below the house, and is home to a large grove of olive trees for olive oil and white wine production. Many of the island restaurants serve the olive oil.
The front and sides of the home feature a wide board-and-batten larch cladding to add depth and allow for a variation of shadows throughout the day.
Siberian larch is the primary facade material. It's finished with a silicon-based protective treatment to allow the wood to weather more evenly.
Sundberg designed the home as a simple box so it would "subordinate itself" to the sandy landscape of birch trees and sea grasses.
Swedish architect Johan Sundberg designed this three-bedroom home in the southern Skåne region for a family of four. The parents grew up in the area, but they now live in Boston.
A generously-sized, comfortable deck lines the water side of the cabin.
The “River Cabaan” is just steps away from the Wilson River and a 80-minute drive from Portland, Oregon.
The home lies within a government-designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
The material is in stark contrast to the rough-hewn walls of the original stone structure.
When renovating a centuries-old beach cottage in Cornwall, architect Adam Casey of Watershedd covered one of the existing additions in vertical black timber.
“Corey’s idea of decoupling the boxes into separate units meant we could play with how far forward or back each one was,” says resident Gabrielle Chamberlain.
The cladding is triple-stained black cedar shiplap. The doors and windows are by Andersen.
A multi-gabled house designed by architect Corey Yurkovich for a couple and their longtime friend sits amid beech trees, cattails, and seagrasses on New York’s Shelter Island.
Landscaping from Piazza Horticultural surrounds relaxed outdoor hangout spots.
A private outdoor shower is located at ground level, for easy access from the beach.
The team relocated the staircase so it doesn’t break up the facade.
Clapboard siding was swapped out for narrow horizontal strips of Meranti wood, and the garage now has barn-style swing doors that fit into the facade.
The bay window was squared off, and the cupola was rebuilt so that the scale works better with the massing of the building.
Oasis Tiny House, clad in teal-painted plywood and a metal roof that's pitched in the front and curved in the rear, was designed and built by Ellie and Dan Madsen of Paradise Tiny Homes in Keaau, Hawaii.
The Portage Bay Residence is a streamlined home that enjoys lake views and total privacy. The garage melds into the industrial, flat exterior, which resembles maritime sheds found throughout the area.
Making maximum use of a tight footprint, architect Robert Sweet designed a two-story home in Hermosa Beach that provides plenty of flexible indoor/outdoor space for residents Anton and Mardi Watts and their children.
12345