Sunlight is plentiful at every level of the house.

Photo courtesy Reinhold Andris Office, Walddorfhäslach.

Orpilla pecks, Apolo pedals.

The bedroom takes up the small second floor of the house.

The house’s street-level entrance shows an openness to its surroundings, and a glass door allows curious passersby a glimpse of the interior.

The firm also designed a slatted screen next to the staircase.

The relatively simple construction incorporates clever sustainable design: a two-level wood roof structure keeps the sun’s heat away from the interior, and small windows at either end facilitate powerful cross-ventilation. It’s natural air-conditioning, and it works beautifully.

Ingrid Blans and Tjibbe Knol relax outside their home, which is made of various recycled materials such as dismantled cable reels, old billboards, and broken umbrellas. Inside, a vintage shop display case exhibits a small fraction of the couple's collection of art and objects.

The lounge at the back of the entrance level exhibits the wide plank flooring common throughout the house. The view through the windows is made more compelling by the strip of green roofing extending the treetop canopy and the glass curtain wall that climbs just high enough to draw a sightline to the patio.

“The access and position of the house provided only one facade, so the distribution [of the rooms] had to be open towards that facade,” the firm says. “By breaking the levels we could drag the light deep in the house.” As for interior lighting, the wall-mounted lamps throughout the house are from Faro, a Barcelona-based lighting company.

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.

From the second level of the house, Griffin climbs the stairs his own way.

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.

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

Leave it to the bloggers at Remodelista to find attractive recycling bins, we love their ten picks.

The slightly below-ground kitchen sits inside a boxy extension, clad in recycled timber and stained kettle black. A wildflower garden grows on its pitched roof.

The bottom level houses the bedrooms where Pilar, José Roberto, Patty, and Jimena loll.

Looking from the open-plan dining area, through the kitchen to to the new living space, one gets views of the tree canopy through a high-level band of frameless glazing.

Architect Stefano Girodo explains the building has a “completely prefabricated and modular structure.” It was built using recyclable and environmentally friendly materials and designed to ensure easy mechanical assembly once on site.

Design-build firm Blue Truck, working with Rough Workshop on the construction, expanded a split-level midcentury house in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles for a family of four: Noel, an entrepreneur, Satoko, a freelance creative director, and their four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. A partial second-story addition adds necessary square footage, and also opens up new views of the city.

The house architects Teresa Sarmiento and Nicolas Tovo designed for their family—including 1-year-old Clara, for whom the structure is named—is a celebration of recycled materials.

Photo by Patrick Barta

Stairs lead to a media and living room, as well as second veranda, located below the main floor. This lower level was previously inaccessible from within the house. A series of baffles hide the pitch of the roof above, producing a sequence of uniform surfaces where light and shadows play during the day.

The couple made the house feel even more spacious by flooding a series of levels with natural light.

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.

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.

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.