Yang Yeo and his girlfriend Ching Ian relax on the back stoop of their renovated and radically updated Singapore shophouse—an archetypal building type in this busy port city. “Shophouses brought back memories of our childhood,” says Yeo.

The beanbag chairs and outdoor sofa and chairs are from West Elm and the Case Study Museum Bench is from Modernica.

Though the front of this 1880s home in Adelaide, Australia, maintains a traditional facade due to strict heritage laws, the rear is modern eye candy at its best. See more of the home.

In fall, the color of this backyard in Charlottesville, Virginia, changes daily with the foliage. Elizabeth Birdsall marvels how new outdoor spaces on her property, like a patio furnished with upholstered seating from Gloster, make enjoying the woods an easy experience: “It’s like comfortable camping, all the time.”

@sticks.and.bricks: it's #treehouse season! please excuse me while I go #playintheyard.

Unable to alter the footprint of the building, the Deams created a backyard living area that nearly doubled the home's living space.

A gravel path leads to a guesthouse, where Trainor supplemented an existing garden of yuccas and palm trees with succulent aeoniums and flowering euphorbias.

On an idyllic afternoon, members of the Oropeza and Castillo clans splash in the backyard pool framed by Trex decking and outfitted with furniture by Móbica.

The house is oriented toward the expansive backyard, where the family spends 80 percent of its time. Alfredo’s wife Lorena, son Lorenzo, nieces Camila and Valentina, and Castillo’s daughter, Regina, hang out by the pool—the focal point of Transepto’s restrained landscape design.

A picnic table in a matching hue to the Stealth Barn rests between the two structures.

The resulting effect is a backyard with a pool at the center that is as nice to look at as to be in.

The nuri-en (an exterior overhang) is one of the few Japanese touches on the home's exterior. Paired with the continuation of the interior floor right out into the backyard, the home opens up to the outside quite nicely.

Architect Gregory Phillips connected the original house to a new modern extension that doesn’t interfere with the surrounding houses. “I try to be true to the location,”he explains, “so it doesn’t seem like some spaceship has landed.”

In the back, ferns and other shade-friendly plants thrive beneath the home’s deep overhangs.

In the backyard, Kunigk “montaged” what she admired in the work of John Pawson, Tadao Ando, and Piet Oudolf, the Dutch garden designer who collaborated on landscaping for New York’s High Line. She plans to reconfigure the plantings again with the landscape designer Rina Zweig, who worked on the front yard.

With a nod to the natural skew of the cliffs nearby, the roof creases inward on the edges, with folds called crickets. The design is twofold: The lower roof utilizes a number of super-integrated gutters and the upper roof collects rainwater.

Usha and Mike Kreaden had a virtually blank slate when it came to the garden outside the 1958 Joseph Eichler house that they bought in Silicon Valley two decades ago.

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.

Another backyard hotspot is the deck, built around an existing boulder, where adults can lounge while the kids climb.

By carving away some of the hillside, the Deams effectively added an outdoor room to their renovated home.

A deck is located off the dining area.

The hardscaping helps keep water use to a minimum. The Lais used gravel—accented by drought-tolerant bamboo—to create their side yard.

The coop grew out of the garden. "We were so excited to have a yard," Snyder recalls. Martin started growing a vegetable bed and soon a friend and owner of Naomi's Organic Farm Supply suggested hens. "She got us excited about having chickens as an extension of our garden," Snyder says.

Snyder and Martin's move brought about an entirely different lifestyle--one that involved a house, a yard, and for Snyder, the chance to launch his own firm, Mitchell Snyder Architecture, after first acquainting himself to Portland, Oregon, as a designer at Scott Edwards Architecture. His first project on his own: a chicken coop for the couple's new feathery friends.

Suzanne and Brooks Kelley at the back of their 1,100-square-foot guest cottage.

In 1962, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Arthur Witthoefft won the AIA's highest honor for a home he built in the lush woods of Westchester County. Having fended off a developer's wrecking ball, Todd Goddard and Andrew Mandolene went above and beyond to make this manse mint again.

When the Ferguson Sauder family—parents Meg, a school counselor, and Tim, a design instructor, plus kids Cole, Olive, and Asher—wanted a multifunctional backyard addition, they decided to build it themselves. Two Liftoff chairs by Tim Miller, one of Tim’s former students, surround an oil-drum fire pit set in granite dug up on the property. On the deck, the Panamericana chair is by Industry of All Nations.

The first thing landscape designer Laura Cooper asked Devis and Purdy was to recall childhood gardens and outdoor play. In that spirit, she designed their backyard, integrating the high ground with the low just outside the “kids’ wing.” The resulting series of outdoor rooms on this quarter-acre is full of memory and play.

In the DoghousePaul and Shoko's dog, Mei, has lucked into a small prefab home of her own. Making use of a water jet cutter at his office, and using Adobe Illustrator as his design tool, Paul fashioned a series of panels that slot together without any nails or screws.

Working with a limited budget, First Lamp designed and built one principle architectural flourish: exposed Douglas fir rafters that would weather to a brighter red over the years and accent the white siding.

An ipe deck slopes sharply skyward behind Amy Persin’s house in Menlo Park, California, creating a secluded backyard getaway that feels like an outdoor extension of her living room. A single step on either side leads to patches of gravel, which her children have claimed as areas for unstructured play.

The modern addition sits on a concrete platform that extends past the house’s envelope, creating welcoming patios on each side. “From any space within the home you are no more than a few steps from one of the outdoor spaces,” Busick says. On the west-facing back porch, Green Kite Chairs by Karim Rashid and a poppy-red hammock offer ideal spots from which to take in the sunset.

Lisette requested the central work island, which cantilevers over the pool.

“I love the look of mass plantings,” notes Neely, near Mexican feather grasses--which thrive on the sunny lot.