The residence is set back a few feet from the site’s edge, allowing more light to flood into neighbors’ windows and leaving space for trees. “The idea was to make a strong gesture to incorporate ideas of openness,” Lynch explains. “It’s not just a box if you look at it closely. It’s a series of planes that fit together."

“This way you have a sequence,” Lynch explains. “The stair is a circulator, and after you take off your coat, you can go downstairs to the powder room or up to the living floor.” On the other side of the millwork, he devised built-in storage and niches for display, as shown in the master bedroom, located on the second floor.

The photographs are by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. On the ground level, a CB2 sofa overlooks the back courtyard.

Custom white oak millwork creates a spine that separates the living areas from the entrance stairway.

When the Casali family gave Michael Krus and Prishram Jain of TACT Architecture free rein to work with unconventional materials, the architects responded by creating a geometric 4,300-square-foot smart home encased in aluminum panels by Agway Metals. The front facade features Cor-Ten steel fabricated by Praxy Cladding.

In the living room, a pair of Frog chairs by Piero Lissoni for Living Divani join custom leather furnishings. The family can finally display all their books and artworks, including the large-scale piece, Topophilia-Imbuing in Monet, 2005, by Keiko Hara.

The family gathers for meals at a center island from Arclinea; the bar stools are by Harry Bertoia for Knoll. Entertaining was difficult in the Lynches’ old place. The openness of the new layout has resolved that problem, and the family frequently opens their doors to guests. “When designing the new home,” Lynch recalls, “I asked, ‘What have we always wanted to do more of but weren’t able?’”

Roberto Burneo designed this home for his eldest niece, her husband, and their three young children in a suburb outside Quito, the capital of Ecuador. The house is set on a flat expanse of land with fruit trees, and Burneo's design "guides the social areas inward in order to link them to the gardens.”

The artwork extends nearly the length of the entire north-facing wall of the living-dining-kitchen area, which overlooks the back courtyard and the garage.

Burneo took advantage of the perpendicular orientation of the volumes to create outdoor spaces that look out to the gardens.

Sawn wood planks add texture to the interior walls.

Burneo oriented the house in a pair of perpendicular volumes. The ground floor houses the public areas, including a study, while the top volume, housing the bedrooms and a family room, is oriented north-south, allowing for warm sunlight and a visual orientation toward the gardens.

The custom kitchen counters are concrete, and the yellow dining chairs add a welcome splash of color.

Burneo added exposed brick to his palette of interior materials.

The architect placed the windows at Sabrina’s eye level so that she’d be able to see her son, Rocco, playing in the yard outside. "You can feel the seasons changing here," says Chiavelli. "I grew up three miles from here, outside in nature. This is a house for experiencing life."

The home’s metal cladding is Pac-Clad, a material typically used for roofs.

Architect Jesse Garlick’s rural Washington vacation home references its rugged surroundings. The steel cladding has developed a patina similar to the ochre-red color of bedrock found in the area.

The architect covered the exterior in Pac-Clad, a metal roofing material, because it's "cost-effective, durable, maintenance-free, and comes in various colors," says Church.

A narrow building next to the main structure houses storage and an outdoor kitchen.

The trip from garage to first floor is through a wood-clad spiral staircase that resembles a giant slatted barrel.

Like the communal spaces, the bedroom features a shining subway tile wall.

The open-plan home’s core is the towering chimney—clad in the same double-long, thin bricks that sheathe the Kolumba museum in Cologne, Germany. It holds three fireplaces, a conventional oven, and a pizza oven; all vent into three distinct flues, emerging from the chimney as their own kind of architectural statement. Inside, life revolves around the brick chimney, which the architect surrounded with a concrete counter that wraps from the kitchen to the living area. The stools are vintage.

Designers Christopher Robertson and Vivi Nguyen-Robertson conceived their house as an unfolding sequence of simple geometric forms: a low concrete wall, a concrete cube, and a boxclad in Siberian larch.

The Brick screen by Eileen Gray for Aram Designs blocks off a small office from the dining room.

A modular shelf system by Alu provides a more sculptural take on the classic bathroom vanity in this Toronto home.

The couple supplemented the rawness of the open living area with funky secondhand finds from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Among the first Passive Houses in France, this bamboo-clad farmhouse by the Parisian firm Karawitz Architecture only uses a tenth of the energy a conventionally constructed home does. Photo by Nicholas Calcott.

The courtyard is just one of many open spaces that will be highly utilized—in the non-winter months anyway. Concrete worked well with developing the language of FlatPak. The second level is a wood panel that can be clad in corrugated metal or cedar—different layers that can be plugged in like covers on your cellphone.

Chicago architect Brad Lynch demolished the 1940s bungalow he’d been sharing with his family for nearly two decades, and in its place built a brick-clad structure that would function as a modern counterpoint to its more traditional neighbors.

Churtichaga and de la Quadra-Salcedo purchased a parcel of former farmland to build their vacation home twelve years ago but only recently completed the house—a timber-clad minimalist structure expertly designed to disappear into the scenic landscape.

Though the fire pit was “kind of an after-thought,” says Hannah, the family uses it year-round. “In the spring and fall, it warms you up on cool nights, and in the summer, it just adds ambience.”

Floors are sealed and waxed concrete. The 4,200-square-foot home is clad in stained local tongue-in-groove cypress.

“The house turns its back to the street while opening up to the views to the northeast through a large glazed corner window system,” Hutchison says. One-by-four and one-by-six inch cedar siding, which were pre-stained in Cabot Semi-Transparent Black, were placed vertically and horizontally on the exterior as a subtle detail.

The family sits around, and under in the case of four-year-old Kaz’ma, the sunken table for a snack. Makiko made the covers of the mats her mother sent from Japan by hand. The black lamp is from Ikea.

Architect Andrew Simpson and the owners wanted to keep the design simple and grounded with “a sense of modest honesty.” In terms of the exterior, “as much of the existing cedar cladding as possible was retained and reused.”