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.

The home, clad in natural Australian timber, enjoys a sense of lightness thanks to slender columns that let it float over the dunes. The driveway and entry, at the rear of the building, have an understated design to build to the interior's magnificent ocean views. Firm director Phil Snowdon explains, “By creating an architectural form that draws your eye and leads you up the steep driveway, we could engage new visitors in a welcoming process that first reveals the object and then slowly reveals the main event, being the view."

The large, naturally lit kitchen is the heart of the house. Messmate-clad cupboards and huge expanses of glass dominate the space where Angelucci uses the sink, Gorman works at the kitchen island, and Pepa and Hazel look on. Play in the courtyard between the kitchen and garage is easily supervised and enclosed from the alley behind the house.

“The steep site lends itself to the ‘upside down’ configuration,” Harkness explains. “It certainly wouldn’t work as well if you could only access the house via the lower level, as this is through the bedroom zone, so we included two entrances. The upper one involves walking across a little bridge.”

Large gum trees offer a natural barrier for the house. Harkness designed the house's footprint in order to minimize the effect on tree roots. “The retained trees offer a sense of layering and age that new vegetation won’t be able to for a long time,” Harkness says.

The compact, hardy cabins were designed to work in a variety of park settings, including the beach.

Fast assembly, affordability, and energy efficiency make kit homes a desirable option for homeowners.

Operable timber shutters and screens offer protection from extreme weather. Zoning the house into three distinct masses creates a partly sheltered courtyard to make this year-round blending of the indoors and outdoors possible.

Heating for the unit is provided by a Spartherm fireplace, with electric heating integrated into the magnesite floor. Walls are insulated with fire-tested wool felt under plywood panels.

Emilio Fuscaldo sits in the garden outside the brick house that he designed for himself and his partner, Anna Krien, on a small subdivided lot in Coburg, a suburb north of Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Nic Granleese.

The L-shaped secondary building perches over a craggy escarpment. It offers the best vantage point for taking in the moss-planted roof, forest, and ocean.

It takes three to five days to install a Vipp Shelter onsite.

Located on a steep site with limited suitable building ground, the firm decided to cantilever the home over the hillside, which has the effect of helping the structure blend in with the landscape.

At over 500 square feet, the house’s green roof may be its most powerful—and most expensive—environmental statement. It cost $8,000 to waterproof, and $7,000 to landscape. Water from the roof feeds the toilet and the garden’s watering system, and the garden itself insulates the house and keeps gas bills low in winter. Photo by Nic Granleese.

NOEM, a Barcelona–based architecture firm, created a metal-clad house for a young client just outside Madrid. It’s raised 12 feet off the ground to offer better views of the landscape, lending it "the futuristic feeling that it just landed," says Pol Guiu, one of NOEM’s cofounders.

External shutters and screens allow the homeowners to manage the sunlight and cross ventilation in certain rooms. Manos Mavridis, also of OLA Studio, explains, “There was a preference for the screens to be manually operated to minimize ongoing maintenance costs and encourage user engagement with their environment."

Mike Kurokawa and Paul Fishman set out for the beach from their house in the Puna region of Hawaii. A bridge leads from street level to the upper floor of the house, which is situated in a natural depression, or kipuka.

Hexagonal and pentagonal panels come together to form this cabin’s oblong envelope. The unique architectural skin mimics the rock formations that surround it.

The staircase is about 46 feet tall from top to bottom.

Thanks to Matthew Hufft, their envelope-pushing architect and longtime friend, Hannah and Paul Catlett have a new home in southwestern Missouri that’s a fresh, unconventional take on the traditional farmhouse.

In the living room, spare Scandinavian design takes center stage. Hans Wegner’s Wishbone chairs surround an Essay dining table by Cecilie Manz for Fritz Hansen; a mostly wood palette is enhanced by slate-gray brick around the fireplace. The paper lanterns throughout the home are a mixture of classics by Isamu Noguchi alongside those picked up in Japan and France.

The cement exterior walls were painted in a dark color to blend in with the forest. Aluminum window frames add some texture to the facade.

A small country road borders the property to the west.

Photo by Patrick Barta

Timber battens were used on north-facing windows to prevent excessive heat in the summer. The exterior is clad in Scyon’s Linea weatherboard and covered in Dylux’s Western Myall paint. Beneath the upper floor, a little nook makes for the perfect covered carport and storage spot for surfboards.

This dreamy, glass bedroom by the lake was created as an early prototype for the prefabricated greenhouse/she kits known as the Kekkilä Green Sheds.

Helsinki architect Ville Hara and designer Linda Bergroth collaborated on a prefab shed-meets-sleeping cabin, which can be assembled with little else than a screwdriver. Bergroth, inspired by nomadic yurt dwellers, wanted an indoor/outdoor experience for her property in Finland.

Six-inch-square blue tiles cover the walls and floor of the girls’ upstairs bathroom. The towels and rug are also by H&M Home.

"How would a kid draw a house?" architect Per Franson asked himself when designing the Olivero-Reinius family home. The simple prefab structure’s unusual color comes from a traditional source: falu rödfärg, the historic mineral paint that gives the region’s famous barns their red color.

The inspiration for this prefabricated, modular family home on Fishers Island, New York, were the views that Tanney and Luntz saw from a 12-foot stepladder, which was balancing on the bed of a pickup truck when they first visited the site.

Snowdon calls the design of the entire house a collaborative process with the clients, who actually recycled a good deal of furniture from their previous beach house, such as the coffee table and arm chairs seen here

The caged staircase was designed by architect Patrick Ousey, with whom Flournoy collaborated in the home’s design. Although initially unconvinced by the staircase detail, “it is a great example of how collaboration brings in different perspectives,” says Flournoy.

The new, enlarged master bedroom is positioned where the old dining room once was. The clients wished to add an ensuite bathroom and walk-in closet. Throughout the design process, there was push and pull with reconciling the programmatic goals with a finite space. “Getting everything the clients needed into a pretty small was achieved through massaging small dimensions from one end of the house to the other,” says Jost.

Inspired by the sea and sand, Richard and Jackie Willcocks chose blue and orange joinery colors for their 1,140-square-foot prefab. The modular home is by New South Wales company ArchiBlox.

RES4’s modular approach provides a Brooklyn family with a beautiful weatherproof retreat on Long Island. Designed as a hybrid between a double-wide and a courtyard house, the 1,650-square-foot North Fork Bay House was prefabricated off-site as two modules. In addition to time and cost savings, prefabrication helped address the restricted building site, which has a very long and narrow footprint limited by FEMA setback regulations and zoning laws.

A Simple Plan A Marmol Radziner–designed prefab house, trucked onto a remote Northern California site, takes the pain out of the construction process.