Feast in the House of Simon Chair designed by Mark Moskovitz.

Bench, $1498.

An Eames lounge and ottoman hold court in the master bedroom upstairs. Plenty of natural light and a muted color scheme give the space a wonderfully light feel.

The dining room features vintage chairs. The table and kitchen cabinets are custom pieces by Carbone; the chandelier came from a local shop.

The dining room features 1970s leather-and-brass dining chairs and a table concocted from a brass-and-silver base and a custom lacquered top. The cheerful blue paint enlivening the doorway is from Emery & Cie.

Manning House by Jack Manning (1960)

This open-concept Amsterdam loft features soaring 15-foot ceilings, an Eames lounge chair and ottoman, and a Jielde light. Throughout the home, Standard Studio architects Wouter Slot and Jurjen van Hulzen favored raw materials, including concrete, oiled oak, and hot-rolled steel, all of which complemented the original space's industrial feel. Tucked smartly underneath the loft, a compact home office features functional built-in shelving and an Eames DSR chair.

Waechter Architecture reimagined a traditional gabled home in southeast Portland without significantly altering the original building. A simple coat of red paint abstracts the century-old structure, creating a residential work of art.

The clients and design team chose to forego an open floor plan in favor of defined, separated spaces. In this scheme, the vertically oriented spaces act as a cinematic "hard-cut" to their horizontal counterparts. The custom hot rolled steel kitchen, one of these vertical transition spaces, receives light from above through a Velux skylight. A GE Profile Induction cooktop and oven and Miele refrigerator complete the space.

Homeowner Susanna prefers a motley set of dining chairs over a coordinated set; that way, guests can pick their favorite when they sit. Photo by: Petra Bindel

House O, designed by Jun Igarashi, forgoes hallways and interior doors in favor of casually interconnected rooms.

Marcus Lee and Rachel Hart’s wonderful wooden home sits at the end of a quiet London lane and politely turns its back on the workshops next door.

Corporate high-flyers and admitted neat freaks Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton couldn’t handle the chaos anymore. Read more about this Victorian terrace in London here.

“In this house, the roof is the only facade—the rest is dissolved beneath it.” —Architect Aljoša Dekleva

At the entry looking upward towards a Velux skylight, a vertical "sleeve" is made of stacked end grain plywood. The theme of vertical and horizontal architectural elements providing different environmental perspectives carries through to the rest of the home. Horizontal forms look out to the lake, while the vertical columns look up the sky.

Original built-in cabinetry is retained throughout the house. Planner Group side chairs by Paul McCobb surround the dining table.

Seen in the architectural context of its London neighborhood, the house is all the more extraordinary: compact, materially innovative, and easy on the eyes.

Chair Necessities The couple’s four Chair One dining chairs by Konstantin Grcic for Magis are among their most prized possessions. They had been given their dining table as a wedding gift but couldn’t afford enough chairs to surround it, so they opted for a wooden bench on one side and the Grcic chairs on the other. Davor says he’s pleased they purchased the chairs early in the design process before the budget got really tight. magisdesign.com

needlepoint seating pads on the Tulip chairs

By creating a desk out of roof beams, this home office perfectly integrates into an open-plan renovation of a Northern Italian farmhouse.

Konstantin Grcic’s Venus chairs for ClassiCon surround a table by Poliform in the formal dining room. Hill selected the Flos chandelier designed by Marcel Wanders for its "Old World reverence." The sleek fireplace mantel was designed by Hill and cobbled together onsite from three solid slabs of limestone.

The flooring throughout the interior is maple. A vintage Ercol sofa and arm chair, Eclipse coffee table by Stua, Wide Wale rug by Bev Hisey Textile Design, and Moon floor lamp by Estiluz Spain furnish the living room. "Extensive planning went into ‘aging in place’ forecasting a host of different scenarios about what that meant physically and psychologically," architect Alex Tedesco says. "We did ‘day in the life’ modeling to understand all the various barrier free requirements that might arise."

A Clement Meadmore Sling chair provides a favorite vantage point for sipping coffee while looking out at Hanging Rock. “It’s always hard to leave and return to the city,” Titania says.

The dining table, made from a single piece of teak, is a little over 13 feet long and was custom made for the space. It can seat up to 24.

In the living room, an Eames lounge chair is matched with a Richard Conover–designed fiberglass chair in similar proportions. A custom coffee table by Asher Israelow com-plements the industrial lighting by Workstead, affixed to walls painted in Farrow and Ball’s Manor House Gray. The sliding doors leading into the home office were fabricated by Markus Bartenschlager.

Photo by Patrick Barta

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.

At their A. Quincy Jones house in Los Angeles, architects Cory Buckner and Nick Roberts used permeable pavers to help the soil retain moisture.

Home Renovation Tip: Get an Understanding of What’s Already Around

Many tiny home dwellers develop eco-friendly habits when they downsize—like adopting a capsule wardrobe, carpooling more, and harvesting rainwater.

Form chair by Simon Legald for Normann Copenhagen, 2012.

The clients insisted that none of the trees on the property be disturbed, so Kevin Alter and his team at Alterstudio Architecture built a deck and an overhang around two of them.

For more bedroom ideas, check out our ten tips for clutter-free bedrooms.

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.

Another view of the deck.