Just up a ladder is the green roof, which is planted with maintenance-free sedums and tall grasses near the patio that Monkman tends carefully.

A Good Reed The most changed area of the home is the small guest room–office, where Neely, who works from home, removed the closet doors and added a grass-cloth wall treatment to distinguish it from the rest of the house’s decor. “Many of the Eichlers originally had grass cloth as a covering on the sliding closet doors,” he says. “The guest room–office is the only other room that can be seen from the public areas across the atrium, and I wanted this wall to add visual interest.”

They installed water-saving artificial grass on their patio for pup Moxy to enjoy.

Native grasses spill forth from the green roof toward a stairway leading to the main level.

Tom Givone's current weekend abode, nicknamed the Floating Farmhouse, is—so far—his capstone project, a synthesis of personal taste, material experimentation, and historically sensitive restoration: a living laboratory for how to bring the vernacular past into the present.

Overhead cabinets now can be easily swung open for ease of access. The kitchens are priced at IKEA’s usual retails. A 10 by 10 foot kitchen fitted with Sektion cabinets will range from around $1,300 to $2,200, excluding appliances.

Landscape designer Bernard Trainor’s creative use of poured-in-place concrete pavers—such as off the living room, where they break up a low-maintenance lawn of June grass—give the irregularly shaped lot a sense of order. Foxtail ferns and blue chalk sticks, a succulent, lend dashes of color to the entry courtyard, while thyme makes for a fragrant accent between the pavers.

Black and white kitchen tiles add visual interest to this stunning modern kitchen by IKEA.

This 3,200-square-foot structure was assembled with a prefabricated foundation, concrete panel siding, and efficient built-ins, minimizing construction debris and toxins—such as concrete foundation tar—on the site.

A tiny outbuilding offers a cozy living space inside a simple shell.

Linden specified a black stain from Cabot for the house’s exterior. The shade draws on Scandinavian and Japanese building traditions and helps the structure blend into the landscape. Native grasses populate the courtyard.

As the facade of a Bates Masi-designed home in Water Mill, New York, rises from eight to 14 feet high, the mahogany planks subtly widen. “It was quite a demand to make of the contractor,” architect Paul Masi says. “But the design was so much about traveling through the site and weaving [the house] together with the deck.”

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.

The family spends summers and school vacations at the bach. New Zealand's relatively mild winters mean they use the house year-round.

Tanya Wexler and Amy Zimmerman linger in the breezeway designed to draw eyes, and footsteps, from the driveway through the house to the gently sloping backyard and swimming pool beyond.

Kayak in hand, Tom and Will make a break for the beach.

The kitchen includes backlit Bear Grass panels from 3form, a range by Capital, and a Thermador hood.

A view across the display island to a breezeway betweent the house and the garage that Pacek and Roynon created as part of their home addition. They use the space for entertaining and food service when the weather cooperates.

A Lakeside Prefab in New Jersey A New Zealand expat and her son use their prefabricated lakeside New Jersey retreat as an outdoorsy counterpoint to city life. Photo by: Mark Mahaney Curious on what was popular last week? Click here!

IKEA chairs join a table from CB2; a Kawneer triple-sliding door opens to the family’s new ipe deck.

The Irwin pool house designed by Landis Gores in 1957 boasts a central room with high ceilings and an unobstructed view of the landscape. In 2005, the Town of New Canaan purchased the property and added exhibition spaces, as well as rooms for lectures and events. The small pavilion also houses an oversized, monumental brick fireplace design that divides the main space from the kitchen area.

Based on the travels of a beloved French naturalist, Mr. Plocq's Caballon is an egg-shaped cabin that takes cues from both naval and aircraft carpentry.

New residential buildings are few and far between in England, so architects like Phillips have increasingly been charged with creating groundbreaking modern environments within the shells of historic houses. “People just find it easier to work within existing houses to transform them to be sleek, stylish and functional,” says Phillips. “Extensions have almost become a requirement for any homeowner who wants to be a part of modern living within the U.K.”

The exterior mixes pale gray wood on the vertical volume, and fiber cement and black brick on the horiztonal volume. The three trees in the front yard were maintained during the renovation process.

Though seemingly whimsical and freewheeling, Sottsass was exacting in his designs: He had forbidden the Olabuenagas from repainting the home’s stucco facade, insisting that they let it “metamorph into what it wants to be,” but the couple ultimately decided to restore its faded colors last fall, using new elastomeric Behr paints that were blended to original specifications.

Using natural materials is one way of bringing nature indoors. Oiled white ash floors and ceilings, along with Italian poplar and Lawson cypress joinery, are found throughout architect Andrew Simpson’s 538-square-foot home outside Wellington, New Zealand.

In the kitchen, the cabinetry is walnut veneer with a weathered finish applied by cabinetmaker David Rogers. “The process involved sanding and rubbing in stain as well as adding a clear finish,” project architect Eero Puurunen says.

In the middle courtyard, the Jacks landscaped a small grass mound for Sadie, five, to play on. The house is topped with corrugated steel. “It’s essentially the cheapest material you can get for roofing in New Zealand,” says Beer.

Induction cooktops, growing steadily in popularity due to their energy efficiency and speed, are part of the offering as well as as a selection of exhaust hoods.

A 17-foot-tall freestanding play structure that designer Sharon Davis designed for her family in upstate New York can only be entered by climbing taut netting and entering through a trap door. Descending requires sliding down two structural-columns-turned-fire-poles.

Much of the cooking and cleaning takes place at the rear counter, which is outfitted with an Evoke faucet by Kohler.

The wood-frame residence and studio are clad in vertical cedar siding—back then, a daring competitor to clapboard—instead of concrete to save costs. The effect is equally seamless, however: “If you drive by it fast enough,” Charles Gwathmey once said, “you still might mistake it for a concrete house.” Photo by Norman McGrath.

A mature avocado tree shades the hardscaped patio located just outside the great room.

This project also includes a swimming dock.

Buenos Aires-based Estudio Ramos designs a concrete, wood, and iron stable that houses 44 prized horses and melds with the surrounding plains. In central Argentina, the province of La Pampa is dominated by vast, grassy plains whose fertile soil supports myriad farms and ranches. Stretching out in all directions, the flatlands resemble an ocean in its sheer horizontality. When professional polo player Nacho Figueras—a champion of the sport and a longtime Ralph Lauren model—enlisted architect Juan Ignacio Ramos of Estudio Ramos to build a stable for 44 polo horses, the architect was sure to incorporate the region’s meditative flatness into the design.