The rear of the house features Victorian brick, a modern extension, and Velfac windows. Landscape designer Matthew Wright was inspired by the art of Henri Rousseau when choosing plants to set amid the garden’s Dorset pebbles.

Outside, the couple clad the house with a rain screen of 1.5-by-1.5-inch strips of spruce to create a “modern rustic barn.” The extra-deep sills of the first-floor window become a bench on the outside and a shelf on the inside.

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.

Another view of the deck.

“The house is a piece of origami made out of triangular shapes, which we then draped over the landscape,” says Arbel.

Alterstudio Architecture of Austin designed this house in the Texas capital for a young family of four.

In consultation with the clients, Alterstudio opted to clad the house in local cypress rather than imported, FSC-certified ipe.

Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton behind their London home.

Bassam (left, with Fellows) hung redwood garage doors that match the house’s exterior.

Fed up with flashy, environmentally insensitive beach homes, architect Gerald Parsonson and his wife, Kate, designed a humble hideaway nestled behind sand dunes along the New Zealand coastline. Crafted in the image of a modest Kiwi bach, their 1,670-square-foot retreat consists of a group of small buildings clad in black-stained pine weatherboards and fiber-cement sheets.

“Peter and I’ve got shockingly similar and far-reaching design inspirations. Our conversations would move easily from brutalism to driftwood to kachinas and then flow right back to something applicable to architecture. I can’t tell you how many times I will do that with a less-design-literate client and just get a blank stare!” —Architect Craig Steely

Kayak in hand, Tom and Will make a break for the beach.

“Segovia is a very central region, but an underdeveloped one,” de la Quadra-Salcedo says. “Traditionally devoted to agriculture and mainly livestock, it flourished in the sixteenth century but now that the older generations are disappearing, there is a problem of abandoned villages and fields.” The structure highlights the rural surroundings.

The Casa Cuatro sits above a 180-foot cliff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. The locally quarried stone makes the house blend in with the landscape and acts as a thermal-mass wall, absorbing heat during the day and releasing it through the evening.

Mark Word Design did the landscaping, with an emphasis on water conservation. "It's about usage levels, but it's also about the way we treat storm water and runoff since it all goes back into our supply at the end of the cycle," designer Sarah Carr says. Word and his team chose plants that help reduce erosion, require little watering, and allow storm water to percolate. Mulch and living ground covers—including Big Blue liriope, marsilea, and Palisades zoysia turf—keep moisture within the soil and lower the temperature of the soil, protecting the roots of the live oak trees.

The interior combines modern and more traditional elements, such as this oriental rug.

The cypress cladding carries over from the exterior to the interior of the house.

The house was built on piers (save for the lower-level bedroom) so that little of the natural landscape would be disturbed.

Where once there was a timeworn 1950s bungalow in the Metropolitan Green Belt south of London, there now stands a dynamic house whose two volumes are joined by a glass atrium. The project was designed by Grant Freeman of OB Architecture.

Churtichaga and de la Quadra-Salcedo purchased a parcel of former farmland to build their vacation home twelve years ago but only recently completed the house—a timber-clad minimalist structure expertly designed to disappear into the scenic landscape.

Atherton's bedroom also contains a miniature piano; outside is a red bud tree, an appealing spot for mellow contemplation.

Having purchased the land from a friend who also has a house in the community, Schneider had a better sense of what she wanted—and what she didn't—her site. "From the experience at the neighbor's house," Foster says, "she knew she didn't want the house to have its back to the morning sun so we created a deck and somewhere to sit outside that faces east." Don't miss a word of Dwell! Download our FREE app from iTunes, friend us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter!

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

A silo ladder in the study leads to the roof deck. Both desk lamps are Tizios by Richard Sapper for Artemide; the pendant is a Zettle’z by Ingo Maurer; and the Kalos armchair and Solo desk chair are by Antonio Citterio for B&B Italia.

The Lai family—Mayuko, baby Shota on her lap, David, Maya, and Yumi sitting on a cushion on the deck—relaxes in their indoor-outdoor living space, made by opening the glass sliding doors to connect the living room and engawa deck.

Located in Springfield, Missouri, this modern farmhouse designed by Kansas-City based firm Hufft Projects exudes the traditional vernacular of Kansas with an updated take on the conventional form. The rolling hills and expansive land resemble the tone of quaint Marquette.

The most sustainable element of all is the Lais’ intention to make their first home their last home as well. “Some people have this mentality of getting a starter house, then upgrading from there,” David says. “We just wanted to find a place to live in and then stay there forever.” Eventually they imagine passing the home down to their children.

As Wright’s first L.A. project, the iconic Hollyhock House was built between 1919 and 1921 and was filled with challenges from beginning to end. Enter Aline Barnsdall, the wealthy oil heiress and arts patron who held the dream of having a live-in venue to produce her own avant-garde plays. Wright wanted to create a design that would be defined by the region and that took advantage of Southern California's temperate climate. To do this, each interior space is echoed with an exterior space in the form of pergolas, porches, outdoor sleeping quarters, glass doors, and rooftop terraces that look out to the Hollywood Hills and the Los Angeles Basin.

Juliet Gray, Mathias Kolehmainen, and their sons Cooper and Cyrus have a new favorite hangout: the wide back steps on the addition, which double as theater seating. (They project movies from the second-floor balcony onto an out-building across the yard.)

For Gabriel Ramirez and his partner Sarah Mason Williams, following the Sea Ranch rules—local covenants guide new designs—didn’t mean slipping into Sea Ranch clichés. The architects love Cor-Ten steel, with its ruddy and almost organic surface, and they made it the main exterior material, along with board-formed concrete and ipe wood. The Cor-Ten, which quickly turned an autumnal rust in the sea air, and the concrete, with its grain and crannies, mean the house isn’t a pristine box, Ramirez says. His Neutra house “was very crisp and clean,” he says. “This house is more distressed, more wabi-sabi.”

Brammy and Kyprianou hardly touched the front of their house, an 1880 sandstone and brick Victorian with galvanized iron ornamentation.

Dappled sunlight and reclaimed-wood floors and walls give the master bedroom a warm, peaceful feel. Giant sliding doors open onto a wraparound deck peppered with potted plants from the couple’s vacations in Brazil, Uruguay, the Netherlands, and Italy.

Across the path is the resident's favorite spot from which to take in the aquatic tableau: a rock garden and sitting area created by landscape designer Tory Polone. Chairs rest near the a hidden grade-level gas fire pit—an on-demand campfire.

Cassidy used the pool as an anchor for an overarching backyard master plan that pulled the parts together.

Tina and Matthew Ford, here with daughter Daisy, are the owners of Shade House Development, the company that designed and is building the suite of houses that comprise Row on 25th in Houston, Texas.