The outside deck, made of local celery-top pine, welcomes both humans and the natural landscape further into the house.

Made from 100% post-consumer paper collected from local businesses, Vancouver-based firm Dear Human's Wallpapering tiles are easy to install and can be printed or painted with custom designs.

QuickStand by Humanscale The push for a healthier, more ergonomic workday means there are more upright desks waiting to stand up and be counted than ever. Humanscale’s new mountable workstation makes it easier to ditch the chair without being saddled with the cost of new office furniture. It’s one of the more simple and straightforward ways to turn your desk into more of a true action office. Photo by Humanscale

A sculptural freestanding washbasin by Gessi is found in the first-floor powder room. The hex tiles are courtesy of Dear Human.

This simplehuman™ steel frame dish rack with wine glass dryer from Williams Sonoma will generously meet your dishwashing needs.

De Lucchi’s study of the human body accompanying his sketches for The Walk is modeled after himself—De Lucchi is known to be a peripatetic roamer, and the act of walking often appears in his creative projects. De Lucchi’s ideas are informed by long-held beliefs about the nature of creativity and memory. Case in point: his sprawling studio in Milan is spread over several floors separated by flights of stairs and divided into zones, ensuring that he and his design acolytes are in a constant state of motion, and creation.

Elizabeth Leriche, a designer and stylist, presented a powerful collection of both burgeoning and established artisans in her Human Made exhibition on the show floor, one of three “inspiration rooms” presented at the fair that underscore the year’s theme. “Making involves our very humanity itself…today there is a growing interest in a philosophy of manual production, an appreciating for the hand and a multitude of skills from yesterday. It is a precursor to the advent of a new productive society.”

Monk's Cafe, maybe the most famous generic diner facade in human history.

Models “are the perfect way of testing the human qualities of design,” says Pakhalé.

The master bedroom opens onto a semicovered outdoor patio, shared with the adjacent bunk room. “In its minimum scale, the house rises by its own will, but also integrates itself respectfully with its surroundings, both natural and human-built,” said the firm.

'Umbrella Pot' by Kyouei Design (Kouichi Okamoto), Japan; 'Green is Protective Umbrella of Human' by Jingfu Wei, China

exterior/human element

"I want my pieces to encourage human relationships and socialization,

“It’s a human-scaled house. It’s not intimidating or fussy. It feels good,” explains architect Solomon Berg.

The formal entry space features a built-in bench and is defined by a timber detail that runs up the walls and across the ceiling. “Built-ins are an excellent way to bring a human scale to a project,” says architect Nicholas Fiore. “People seek an intimacy—a coziness—in their homes, and we think that niches, window seats, benches, nooks, and other ‘hand-scale’ details can satisfy that human need.”

Navigating a tricky corner lot, the founders of OPEN For Humans create a live/work sanctuary that privileges outdoor spaces.

Astra Walker faucets bedeck the vanity. The aged brass and honed marble “further reflect the human interaction with nature and time,” says Fox.

Reveals and windows built into the unit help bring the cabinet down to a more human scale, while hidden panels provide functionality with minimal visual clutter.

"I intended to create futuristic and savage architecture that awakens human animal instincts in which the inside and outside are reversed multiple times," states Hirata.

The main bathroom, with a prominently placed soaking tub, is a restorative haven within the home. "My favorite part [of the home] is the bathtub, which has a clerestory window of the downtown skyline, and another window that looks out to see the Hollywood sign in the distance," shares Melanie. The luminous space features ceramic floor tile from Ceramic Technics in Ecco Mineral Stone 2.0, Wilsonart quartz counters in Rio Upano, and a white LED sconce by StudioM. The white oak vanity was custom designed by OPEN For Humans.

To deter all bird collisions, his home’s Ornilux windows use a specialized inner coating to reflect ultraviolet light visible to the birds but invisible to the human eye.

According to the architects, the house's "thinner dimensions not only display refinement of technique, but also remove visual weight from materials—the position being that lightness is good for the human spirit and visual heaviness is not."

Philippe Starck and Eugeni Quitllet (for Dedon) collaborated on the Play Collection. According to Starck, the collection represents "the best of the human and the best of the machine."

A corner fireplace faced in Ann Sacks concrete tiles anchors the living room. “There are LED lights behind the peeled back tiles,” Herrmann says. “There is an apparent human touch; each one is a little different.”

Biophilic design prefers natural over synthetic materials, as human beings innately feel more at ease with the former. In this house in Israel, the limestone walls are recycled from dismantled houses in the region. The stone staircase is original.

Husband-and-wife ceramic artists, Dear Human, baked x-shaped decals into store-bought Olympia Tile before arranging them in the kids’ bathroom. The tub is by Bette and the sink, set in a Corian countertop, is by Duravit.

The Cuckooz team even curated a playlist of calming cello music to play throughout the apartments. The range of the instrument is identical to that of the human voice, and cello music has been proven to reduce stress levels.

For places like the kitchen and bathrooms, the Huffts chose to install SAGE’s Appliance Switches and a number of Motion Sensors, which detect human motion without picking up false alarms from small sources.

The Kiasma, which opened in 1998, is Helsinki’s contemporary art museum. Designed by Steven Holl, the building’s scale is based on the dimensions of the human body.

The firm juxtaposed a standing-seam metal envelope with thin strips of cedar on the exterior. “We're playing with the textures on the outside of the house,” says Campos, pointing out that the cedar brings a “human scale” to the industrial nature of the metal.

Double height kitchen with the warm mass of cabinets rising like a stalagmite in the cavern scaling the height while the hung pendant lights from ceiling coming down like stalactites to the human scale.

The home is mostly clad in black trapezoidal-profile steel, with cedar boards lining what the owners call the “human spaces”—external passages between buildings. A solar hot water system perches on the roof.

The “Sassi” of the Southern Italian UNESCO World Heritage City of Matera are ancient cave dwellings dug out of the region’s limestone rock, which have been used by humans from as far back as 7000 BC.

"I wanted polarity between the skin—the solid, pure form—and for human interaction, I wanted warmth," says Christoph Kaiser. After bidding out millwork for an estimated $60,000, Kaiser decided to complete the work himself with the help of his neighbors.

“Versus a flat ceiling or a flat roof, when you have that bolted ridge above you, it creates a completely other type of interior experience for the client, which we find people love, we love ourselves, and it is much more human,” says Klymson.

My Neighbor Totoro