All of the Jenn-Air appliances, including the washer and dryer, are electric, as the owners asked the city to cut the gas line to the house. The kitchen cabinetry is from IKEA and features custom, matte-gray doors and Silestone countertops. The floorboards are reclaimed maple from an old tire factory, sanded and stained gray.

San Francisco print on maple veneer, $15.

Making use of the hilltop location, each window was planned to frame interesting vistas or to find the best sight lines around adjoining buildings.

A landscape of native grasses designed by GSLA Studio complements the raw textures of the concrete-and-ipe front facade.

In the living room, guests gather on a matching ebony sofa and daybed from Hudson and a pair of Jorge Zalszupin lounge chairs. An Yves Klein coffee table—filled with the artist’s signature International Klein Blue pigment— provides a vivid burst amid otherwise organic tones. The walnut-and-bronze cabinetry is a custom design.

The house that Fleetwood Fernandez Architects designed for contractor Mehran Taslimi and his wife, Laila, embraces its surroundings. “They wanted doors that they could just throw open,” designer Hunter Fleetwood says of the retractable wall system from Vitrocsa.

“We didn’t want panel-formed, smooth-like-glass concrete; we wanted texture,” Fleetwood says. A cast-resin piece by DeWain Valentine sits at the foot of the sculpted walnut stairs.

A couple—he an entrepreneur working in logistics, she a stay-at-home mother—bought an 8,500-square-foot house here and approached JSa, a Mexico City-based architectural firm, with the idea of remodeling it. The house was poorly sited on its lot in a manner that drew very little natural light. The architects sized it up and quickly realized that the best solution would be to tear it down and start from scratch.

The house was designed as a long, linear structure to accommodate the residents’ request that visitors always feel connected to the site as a whole.

Before the addition of the approximately 750-square-foot pool (and its 65-square-foot hot tub), the lot was a scramble of structures: the house in one corner and the guesthouse and the office each occupying another.

Once in the pool, however, it feels more like the ocean. As with a shelf, the bottom drops quickly from three feet to the nine-foot deep end. A set of three long, shallow steps sits above the middle depth like a sandbar at high tide, the top tread covered with just a few inches of water.

Photo courtesy of JSa.

Angela Brooks and son Calder revel in the benefits of free solar energy, cheerfully opening the living room’s big glass doors when it’s time to play.

With the home’s glass walls pulled open, the patio and fire pit become an extension of the dining room.

Maple Spread Knife, $100. Photo by Nikole Herriott

In the kitchen, a Dornbracht faucet joins a Silestone countertop. Paint in All White by Farrow & Ball—a shade used throughout the house—provides a crisp backdrop for a print from Thomas Demand’s series The Dailies, while a vintage Boris Lacroix lamp hangs ready to illuminate the scene.

The bold and graphic pattern of the Joonas Stick Umbrella from Marimekko almost makes you wish for rain. A departure from most umbrellas, which are usually solid black or muted in pattern, the Joonas adds personality to your rain protection.

Landscape designer Jay Griffith recreated the area between the house and the studio.

The clerestory windows were originally screens covered by sliding plywood panels that could be opened to allow in light and air.

The residents store perishable items that don’t need refrigeration—like fruits, vegetables, onions, and garlic—in maple-lined pantry drawers.

Gliss swivel stools and a Dowel bar stool share space in front of a custom maple kitchen island. The pendant lamps are by Lightolier.

The kitchen is outfitted with Akurum cabinets from Ikea. The island is also an Ikea cabinet, customized with maple panels to match the flooring.

Wire stair balustrades create an airy vibe while reinforcing the linear wood detailing throughout. In the dining area, a Sputnik-style chandelier by Rewire in Los Angeles hangs above an oxidized maple table from BDDW and Clifford Pascoe chairs from Metropolis Modern.

Additions of color in the interior are minimal, but when they are included, they make a lasting impact, such as with this rainbow art piece by local artist Roi James. “Although we had commissioned the piece based on a recent show we went to, I don’t think either of us realized that it would work so well with our [colorful] cookbook display [in the dining area],” Flournoy admitted. The rug and brass side table are from West Elm, the couches from Scott+Cooner. The butterfly chairs were custom made by Robert Smith.

The graphic tile covers the floor, walls, and ceiling. The kitchen millwork was done by Inovart Carpentry.

In the dining room, the vintage table and chairs are set off by a Modo Chandelier from Roll & Hill and a vibrantly patterned Anthropologie rug.

Dutch designer Remko Heemskerk's New York City prints gloss over the Big Apple's occasional grittiness to portray a candy-colored city rich in architectural heritage.

The Lumimarja print by Marimekko.

A musician plays a 3D-printed guitar that started as a nylon powder, which is then hardened by a laser and melted into shape.

Each featured artist is introduced before a selection of his or her work is presented on the following pages. Here, one of the images used in the opener for San Diego-based printer Andrew Holder.

The master bedroom features a Case Study bed from Modernica.

Sports rivals and design partners J.P. Stallard and Rob Duncan collaborate under the name Art of Sport to create vibrant prints that reference sports iconography. Each design fits a standard IKEA RIBBA frame, which significantly reduces the cost of integrating one into your home.

Tipsy Paperweight, $35 at the Dwell Store Tipsy is a tabletop object that is crafted from solid turned brass and turned maple. Structured in a teardrop shape with a weighted brass base and conical wood top, Tipsy is impossible to knock over, and can be used as a paperweight, accent piece, desktop toy, or even as a stress reliever.

The Japanese maple gives the courtyard its peaceful character.

The glass-walled master suite opens to the surrounding forest and gardens and feels totally separate from the children’s and guest bedrooms upstairs.

Santa Cruz–based company Verve has three locations in the beachside city. Its roastery is sited in a structure that was built in 1914 to house the Seabright Cannery, which operated until 1989. After that, it became a warehouse for skate and surf companies. Fuse Architecture was called into convert the space into a roasting plant and retail storefront that opened in 2011. "The roastery location is in an industrial warehouse right in the middle of a neighborhood," says Dan Townsend of Fuse Architecture. "Other tenants in the complex are Oneill Surf Boards, Santa Cruz skate boards, Santa Cruz Mountain Bikes, Element, Pacific Edge Climbing, and others. The neighborhood had not dealt with the smells, noise and traffic of a coffee roaster so the Owners wanted us to design the space where the neighbors would feel like they could walk up, see the operation, and order coffee."