An office nook and library can participate in the open plan or disappear behind pocket doors.

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.

Alex Gil and Claudia DeSimio created a duplex in an apartment building where they’d been renting for years in Brooklyn, New York, and set to work gutting the interior and adding a new rooftop addition clad in panels of Cor-Ten steel.

Barbara Hill's Dancehall/House in Marfa, Texas September 14, 2010 Misty Keasle

The entire house is painted in one color: Sherwin Williams' Ibis White.

Their creative confections may ruin our diets, but we’re happy to be their taste testers anytime.

Light streams into the bedroom through walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. The windows are triple-glazed, creating a tight, eco-friendly seal.

In this sleek kitchen renovation in San Francisco, the kitchen backsplash is an easy-to-clean glass backsplash that mimics the glossy finish of the surrounding white cabinets. Painters accomplished the high-gloss finish on the cabinets of a kitchen in San Francisco by applying a coat of paint, polishing it with very high-grit sandpaper, repeating the process for each layer, then topping it with three coats of clear varnish. "It’s like an auto body," says builder Jeff King. "It’s incredibly beautiful." The island provides shelving space and storage as well as a second sink, an is topped with pietra grigio marble.

The challenge of renovating an iconic midcentury house is surely a daunting one for any architect, but apply this formula to a Richard Neutra house, and the responsibility rises exponentially. This was the situation for Los Angeles–based architect Peter Grueneisen, founder and principal of Los Angeles–based Nonzero Architecture, who inherited the task of taking on significant updates to an already-altered Neutra—the 1949 Freedman House in Pacific Palisades, California.

Saved from demolition, stripped of awkward alterations, and faithfully restored, these rehabbed homes prove how timeless midcentury design can be.

The original home was preserved and renovated. In the front bedroom, a small window was replaced with a large painted-steel window seat, a favorite of the residents' grandchildren.

The couple picked inexpensive white porcelain tiles for the tub and shower, but splurged on a Carrara marble countertop for the double vanity. The medicine cabinets are by Fresca.

At the opposite end of the studio, Framework Architecture created a partially enclosed sleeping nook that is spacious enough to fit a full-size bed.

The large patio leads to a newly landscaped back garden. An expansive glass wall promotes seamless indoor-outdoor living. Inexpensive brick pavers were chosen for the rear patio; they offer textural contrast with the steel of the door, brick of the rear facade, and pale gray wood of the interior floors.

Barbara Hill's Dancehall/House in Marfa, Texas September 14, 2010 Misty Keasler

“A critical aspect of the project was the incorporation of natural light and ventilation within a broad footprint,” Simpson says. Conventionally private areas, like bedrooms and bathrooms, are therefore reinterpreted with more openness in mind. For instance, this bathroom’s skylights mirror those found throughout the rest of the property. The bathtub, basins, and showerhead were all purchased at the Australian retailer Reece.

The renovation revealed a 30-foot-deep well beneath the bedroom, which the team half-jokingly considered turning into a fish tank. Instead, they opted for a simple bedroom with plenty of built-in storage.

Designer Jeff Sand’s Universal Chairs combine his love for classic French café chairs with an appreciation for “the beautiful metal casings on an old Moto Guzzi.” Sand Studios also designed the dining table and pendant lamp.

In the kitchen, the couple kept the old oak cabinetry but refinished it. “We wanted a very clean look, so we opted for no hardware and painted it the same color as the walls,” Niffenegger says. They upgraded the countertops with leathered black pearl granite. A Louis Poulsen pendant light hangs over the sink, a leftover from the original construction. “Like any good Swiss, we have a Nespresso machine,” Niffenegger jokes.

Shibata made the 10-person dining table using $130 sawhorse legs from Maruki Wood Products Company topped with a sheet of birch plywood. A hole in the sliding wall fits over the table, enabling it to be used in both the library and the meeting room. malki.jp A movable wall clad in wainscoting on one side slides along tracks in the dining-room ceiling, dividing the room into a meeting space and a library. The Shiro Simple Modern Pendant lights can be easily removed and reattached after moving the wall. vanilladesign.jp

Donut sits on a custom bed made by craftsman Pete Deeble. “Above the bed I hung a vintage Evelyn Ackerman textile discovered on eBay,” says Frank.

A Carrara marble backsplash adds cool contrast and a sense of drama when set against the custom oiled-steel black cabinetry in the renovation of the kitchen in this A. Quincy Jones home in Los Angeles.

"It only cost about $48,000 to build, which was incredibly cheap," says Turner of the Stealth Barn. "We got the Timber Frame Company to supply the shell, then we clad it and fitted out the interior and windows ourselves. The idea was to take the archetypal black tar-painted agricultural building and make an almost childlike icon of that."

The budget was nearly as tight as the space in this cheerful renovation of a 516-square-foot flat in Bratislava. The centerpiece of Lukáš Kordík’s new kitchen is the cabinetry surrounding the sink, a feat he managed by altering the facing and pulls of an off-the-rack Ikea system. The laminate offers a good punch of blue, and in modernist fashion, Kordík forwent door handles in favor of cutouts. “I wanted the kitchen to be one simple block of color without any additional design,” he says.

For a cost-conscious 2,000-square-foot renovation located 30 minutes outside of Austin, Texas, architect Nick Deaver took a look around for inspiration. He spied galvanized metal cladding on the region’s sheds and co-opted the inexpensive, resilient material for his own design.

One of the greatest design challenges, according to Franz and Paré-Mayer, was reimagining the dark, unfinished garage space in a way that would “establish [it] as primary, instead of an afterthought to the original floor above.” This was achieved by layering open, linked spaces on the ground floor and sticking to a few carefully selected materials for cohesion and fluidity. There are hardly any hallways in the home; every space serves a function. Polished concrete floors continue throughout the new living level, and a bent metal dining chair with a reclaimed Douglas fir backrest made by Scholz sits in front of an open white oak staircase.

The second-floor office is housed inside a rounded rectangle of concrete that the architect inserted on top of the old farmhouse.

The open staircase includes a lot of glass and is a focal point of the home, says Niffenegger. The staircase leads to a loft upstairs and three bedrooms on the lower level. The master bedroom sits on the second floor. Red oak hardwood floors run throughout the residence.

A family of cost-conscious Hamburgers converted a kitschy turn-of-the-century villa into a high-design home with a strict budget in place. To unite the quaint masonry of the original villa with the squat, ugly add-on built flush against it, the architects decided to paint the old-fashioned facade graphite gray and then covered the box next door in plain, light-colored larch. Photo by Mark Seelen.

Custom built cedar window frames make up several ‘window walls’ in the house, offering views of the North Carolina woods and plenty of natural light.

"The most challenging part of the design was fusing the old part of the house with the new addition," says principal architect Alex Terry. The character and architectural integrity of the single-level 1950s ranch house was thoughtfully reconsidered during the addition and remodel. The home’s front porch, typical of the period, was refreshed with Ipe decking and railing.

Fabian plays with Morten in the yard, which features a spacious lawn and a greenhouse.

In the kitchen, white MDF cabinets stow tools. A Lebanese cedar island and stainless-steel countertops provide ample work space—and a place to display treasured items, such as the Buono V60 drip kettle by Hario. The island features a Franke sink with a Vola faucet. The oven is by Siemens.

Home Renovation Tip: Determine Splurge-Worthy Items Upfront

A door frame was preserved as "a sculptural memory piece," Sara Imhoff says, after a wall separating the old kitchen from a small dining room was demolished. The countertops and backsplash are by Caesarstone.

With three sons in the family, the kitchen gets a lot of use. Hee barstools by Hee Welling for Hay slide up to a multi-functioning island where the family gathers to eat, study and play.