All Photos/exterior/building type : house

Exterior House Design Photos and Ideas

Simon Knight Architects turns a historic building into a contemporary family home by sprucing up its exterior and rejiggering the ground floor.
“The addition is oriented towards the sun and faces the original Californian bungalow, allowing you to look at the heritage house from the new part and vice versa,” said Welsch. “It combines two unlikely architectural expressions—the casualness and generosity of a lightweight timber-clad building with the heaviness of earth construction.”
Sherry Birk and Anthony Orona, tapped HR Design Dept, whose co-principal, Eric Hughes, is a longtime friend of Anthony’s, to design the midcentury-inspired, one-story house in Austin. The dark metal fascia emphasizes the home’s horizontality and complements the earth-toned brick facade.
The large pocket doors of Mandeville Canyon House open up the corner of the living room to the concrete terrace and lawn beyond. This house, designed by Dutton Architects, is perfect for informal living and taking advantage of the southern California climate.
The view from the rear lawn towards the house. The outdoor living room is accessible from the family room (on the right) and the living room (on the left).
“We sculpted the lawn, so it became layered, almost like an amphitheater,” says Wyllie, who salvaged stones from the site to create steps down to the yard.
The design team painted the exterior a dark, charcoal gray and sliced a two-story volume through the facade, removing part of the second floor to create the double-height space.
To the front, the gardens are laid around a central lawn with a circling driveway which provides parking. There is also a garage for family cars.
Dad, a swimmer and triathlete, pops down to the river every chance he gets, rinsing off in the outdoor shower afterwards.
Summary turned some of the concrete modules on their sides to create two-story cabins.
The prefab compact cabins that Summary designed for Syntony Hotels in Paradinha, Alvarenga, Arouca, Portugal, are made from concrete, pine, and glass.
The new addition is spanned by a sliding glass door to the kitchen, bringing in much more natural light and creating easy flow between inside and out. The owners especially appreciate how the new deck is at grade with the exterior door for a seamless transition, making the kitchen feel “a part of the garden,” says the homeowner.
Bowick says the shingles were at first a golden honey hue. “As it patinated, they became this beautiful silver-gray. It’s similar to the decks and railings, which are hemlock. They also have a nice patina,” he says.
Rich, dark concrete panels and colorfully dispersed windows wrap the exterior in varying permutations.
Achieving such efficiency and maintaining the integrity of the wetlands and woodlands on the property meant more research for both the designers and the resident—just getting approval for the siting of the buildings and the driveway took eight months—but Hague is hardly one to do things half way. “A lot of times couples engage in house-building, like birds. I'm doing this solo, more like a monk,” he says of the deeply personal undertaking.
"The owner wanted the front door to match the same yellow of Caterpillar, the heavy machinery company,
A third of the house and deck cantilever out toward the stream, and the void beneath the deck provides a place for wood storage. The cabin sits just 100 feet from the water, and with the windows open you can hear the ambient rush of the stream from throughout the house.
Eivind Bøhn’s cabin on the outskirts of Hardangervidda National Park is a modern update of the classic Norwegian <i>hytte</i>. The design, by Snøhetta architect Øystein Tveter, features a sod-covered roof that blends with the grassy hillside in warmer months.
Designer Marc Perrotta and travel editor and writer John Newton renovated and expanded a colonial building in Mérida, Mexico, with the help of Jorge Novelo Caamal of Paralelo 20. The house’s pale-green plaster facade gives away little of what awaits inside.
Built as a farmhouse in the 19th century, then used as a dacha in the Cold War era, the structure was most recently transformed by architects Sierra Boaz Cobb and Christine Lara Hoff. <span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">Hoff says she and Cobb saved about 40 to 50 percent of the house’s existing elements—notably the original brick facade, which now contrasts with new solar roof tiles from Solteq.</span>
The structure appears to hover above a stone retaining wall.
“We wanted to tackle the dream and challenge of designing our own house and create a space that would get us close to nature,” Alessandro says.
Exterior
The original home was converted into a bedroom level, and given a second-story addition and roof deck. The dark exterior color, a charcoal-eggplant hue, lets the landscape colors stand out in contrast. “The existing house roof became the roof deck,” says Rogers. “And then I just shifted over the addition so that it floated over the landscape.”
On the boathouse's lakeside, the family can just open a garage door and lead one of their two small boats down the rails and into the water. Beside is a small deck.
Ryan Anderson of RAD Furniture designed the stools as well as the table and benches on the pool deck.
"I wanted the bones of the house to be bold, strong and simple,
The green roof, wood cladding, and low profile help to integrate the home with its lush, natural surroundings.
The volumes that contain the living room and a guest bedroom were designed with roof terraces, and green roofs cover four of the other volumes.
Upcycled wood—sourced from fallen trees near the site—was used as part of the shrub-covered green roof.
Wexler and Harrison's original plan was to create affordable vacation homes for a growing middle class. When this home first went on the market with the others in 1962, it was competitively priced between $13,000 and $17,000. Today, the kitchen has been restored following guidelines from its original configuration, and the landscaping was updated in 2001 with Wexler's oversight.
Setback from the street, this extremely private one level property has sliders with outdoor access, solar panels, and mountain views from every room.
Arcadia windows and doors with bronze finishes help achieve the homeowners' goal of indoor/outdoor living.
It’s hard to believe that, only two years ago, Jessy Moss and Steve Jocz’s glistening white home in Indian Wells, California, was being marketed as a teardown. Jessy, an interior designer who used to be a singer/songwriter, and Steve, a realtor who was once a member of the band Sum 41, saw the stucco-clad home’s potential and made it their mission to fix 50 years of decay. As the project unfolded, they researched the home’s origins, turning up troves of documents that strongly suggest it is an unrecognized work by midcentury icon William F. Cody. The circular concrete pavers in the driveway, replicas of originals, are reminiscent of pavers that Cody used for a motor court at another Southern California home.
On the north-facing facade, it’s easy to discern where the original glass doors used to open directly to the deck. In spring of 2012, Block Island contractor John Spier replaced the entire wall of glass panels.
“Metaphorically, the cabin’s exterior is like a cut log,” Lane says. “The black-stained Western red cedar is the bark, and the Douglas fir siding under cover is the exposed wood once the log has been cut.” Beyond the house and native sod gardens, a meadowscape blends into the mature pine forest at the lakefront. “We wanted a woodland garden quality,” landscape architect Soren deNiord says.
DeNiord designed a simple concrete bench with a honed top to run parallel to the randomly sized concrete pads that lead to the covered entry. He planted blueberry bushes behind the bench and a river birch tree behind the boulder. To conjure a wabi-sabi feel outdoors, diNiord poured concrete around a boulder. “It represents the interruption of perfect geometry,” he says.
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.
Perched below the Griffith Observatory and overlooking Hollywood is a lush lot crowned with four towering olive trees and a 1965 home designed by modernist architect Craig Ellwood. When a young couple purchased the home in 2018, it needed substantial work. For a historic restoration, they called on Woods + Dangaran, a local firm fluent in modernist history. The team completed a meticulous restoration of the home while keeping original components like the linear shape, open plan, and expansive windows. One of the most striking features is the original koi pond (a feature deemed so essential that its preservation was a condition of escrow) that is now crossed via a bridge that leads to a new lap pool—perhaps the biggest intervention on the property.
The house has a front door, but it’s actually not the main entrance: That’s found around the side, via a soothing, wood-lined courtyard. It’s a natural space for outdoor entertaining, too, thanks to the built-in fireplace and bench.
The Monocular - Back at Dawn
This barn-like residence enjoys sweeping views from all sides to the picturesque Northern California landscape that surrounds it: Mayacamas Mountains, roaming sheep, and Monterey pines. An L-shaped ipe deck connected the main residence to an art studio and forms a cozy courtyard, complete with pool.
To turn a home into a permanent residence for a family of four, Rama Estudio attached a prefab glass-and-steel box that extends into the surrounding wilderness.
The home is clad in red-painted Norwegian pine, echoing the red-flecked trunks of the surrounding spruce forest. “We wanted to reference a traditional red barn in a modern way and pull it forward into our time and give it a complexity,” says color consultant Dagny Thurmann-Moe.
"In some ways the strongest attributes of the house are probably the outside spaces,” says Court. The original cedar deck was replaced with Kebony decking that wraps around a century-old cherry tree. A pair of Andy rockers from Mamagreen face an ottoman by Kenneth Cobonpue. The accordion doors are a NanaWall SL-60 system that allows the main room of the guesthouse to open completely to the deck.
Dwellings Winner: Casa Ter by Mesura Mesura designed a retreat for a family of five in the Catalonian countryside, utilizing regional and artisanal building techniques and local materials for a sustainable home that blends with the landscape.
The 1967 beach house—which underwent a meticulous renovation by Bates Masi, the original architect’s firm—is listed as an exclusive holiday rental along the coast of Long Island in New York.
<span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">Designed by Atelier Lina Bellovicova, House LO marks the country’s first residential project to use hempcrete, a sustainable and fire-and-mold-resistant materil. </span><span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">"The roof is covered with a green carpet so that the house merges with nature and is well insulated,
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