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.

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

Using natural materials is one way of bringing nature indoors. Oiled white ash floors and ceilings, along with Italian poplar and Lawson cypress joinery, are found throughout architect Andrew Simpson’s 538-square-foot home outside Wellington, New Zealand.

In the DoghousePaul and Shoko's dog, Mei, has lucked into a small prefab home of her own. Making use of a water jet cutter at his office, and using Adobe Illustrator as his design tool, Paul fashioned a series of panels that slot together without any nails or screws.

If you're looking for the ultimate minimalist bed frame, a platform bed with edges that extend beyond the mattress allow it to double as a bedside table, eliminating the need for other furniture.

The outdoor room is backed by a gabion wall made of stone. Rainwater runs off the roofs into a channel before being funneled through pipes concealed within it to an underground concrete tank.

Open enclosures and connections to adjacent living spaces keep the home inviting and airy rather than densely packed—a key feature for an owner of two dogs: Ben, a whippet, and Flynn, an Irish gypsy dog.

Oriented to absorb the afternoon sun, floor-to-ceiling doors comprise two-thirds of the home’s west-facing walls, which open to an elevated deck overlooking Island Bay. Combined with extra-thick building insulation, this passive element provides sufficient heating for the home, even during winter months—a true feat given the region’s cold seasonal winds.

The family spends summers and school vacations at the bach. New Zealand's relatively mild winters mean they use the house year-round.

Omer Arbel, the creative director at industrial design firm Bocci, was given three parameters when he began designing a home for his colleague Randy Bishop: Create a “profound” connection between the internal and external spaces; build only one level; and, most crucially, utilize a wealth of 100-year-old beams salvaged from a series of warehouses owned by Bishop’s ancestors.

White tiles envelop the en suite master bathroom.

The wooden box is as functional as it is finely crafted, with room for clothes up top. Each niche holds treasures from travels, family keepsakes, books, and more.

Bookshelves add extra utility to the undulating staircase in Tokyo's 921-square-foot Coil house. The space was designed by architect Akihisa Hirata for Sakura and Ryo Sugiura, a young couple with two children.

For now, one-year-old Awa is small enough to sleep in the hammock that hangs from the ceiling.

Tagliabue made sense of the soaring volume in the library by installing double-height custom bookcases that can be accessed via a catwalk.

Halfway through a pregnancy isn’t exactly the ideal time to buy a house. So after spending months scouting San Francisco’s Victorians and turnkey cookie-cutters—and almost defecting to the East Bay—Lorena Siminovich and Esteban Kerner decided to put the hunt on hold until after their baby was born. But then one afternoon Kerner, a design director with Old Navy, logged on to Craigslist on a whim. He saw a below-market listing for a single-family home in Noe Valley, their neighborhood of choice. With crumbly brick cladding, peeling rust-brown paint, and rotting garage doors, the house lacked curb appeal. But the Argentine couple was drawn to the interior. "It was amazing and strange at the same time," says Kerner of the 1,485-square-foot, multilevel, midcentury maze. "Mind-boggling," adds Siminovich. "It was just a knot of doors and a series of insane stairs to nowhere."

The top of the house is dedicated to a dining area and a kitchen outfitted with steel-topped cabinets from Sanwa Company.

Visiting a Manhattan apartment designed by Tim Seggerman is like sitting inside one of Nakashima’s cabinets, a metaphor realized most fully in an ingenious "library"—really a glorified cubby with a banded maple ceiling, conjured from a free space adjacent to the loft bed.

Simpson runs his practice, WireDog Architecture, from his home study, where custom bookshelves line the perimeter of the mezzanine for a storage solution that doubles as railing.

The home also extends into outdoor panoramas, even—and especially—from the ground floor, where a westward-facing deck cantilevers out into the lush landscape.

Located in New Zealand, this compact prefab vacation home in the seaside community of Onemana Beach was a collaboration with architecture students from Auckland’s Unitec Institute of Technology.

The courtyard is just one of many open spaces that will be highly utilized—in the non-winter months anyway. Concrete worked well with developing the language of FlatPak. The second level is a wood panel that can be clad in corrugated metal or cedar—different layers that can be plugged in like covers on your cellphone.

“I suppose you could consider me part of a subculture who lived in various inner-city spaces,” says Simpson, whose previous homes include ad hoc spaces in industrial warehouses, floors of office buildings, and units above shops and bars. In designing his Island Bay home completely from scratch, he retained his experimental spirit: “We wanted a house that responded to our wider social, environmental, and economic concerns rather than something that blindly followed convention,” he says. Unassuming in sight, the home’s corrugated-metal cladding (above) recalls the tin shed, a vernacular housing type in the region.

A wood-lined outdoor shower adds a modern touch to one of the decks.

At street level, the wooden garage door opens its toothed maw.

The sunny side of the home is clad in cedar weatherboards and features sleeping quarters on the upper level with living spaces below.

Prefab house in Muskö, Sweden

Multi-discipli­nary Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune created the plans for this home for design-minded kit-house manu­fact­urer Arkitektus. Considering the unique balance of the facade, as well as its climate-specific construction—the asymmetrical "lifted" roof allows for both water drainage and maximum light during the dark winter months—Claesson Koivisto Rune’s approach to the project is some­what surprising. "We design buildings from the inside out," explains principal Eero Koivisto. "The exterior is more or less a product of the interior plans."

Freshly baked cookies can go directly from oven to eager eaters in the living room via the pass-through.

They restored small alcoves to rooms including the office (shown here) and living room and worked carefully with the existing windows. They also hunted down a craftsman, Marc Ablasou, to install oak floors in a herringbone pattern—a touch that subtly complicates Safdie’s aesthetic. In the office, the mirrored console is vintage and the Grand Prix chair is by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen.

A 606 Universal Shelving System by Dieter Rams for Vitsoe hangs tough on the only opaque wall of the living room. Russell-Clarke and Moolsintong designed the coffee table, and Marcel Wanders gets credit for the Bottoni sofa for Moooi.

Inspired by the small scale of Japanese residences—in particular, Makoto Masuzawa’s 1952 Minimum House—architect Andrew Simpson designed his own economical 538-square-foot home set into a wooded site in Island Bay, a coastal suburb outside Wellington, New Zealand.

The master bedroom is defined on the north side by a series of indoor louvers, which allow the couple to frame and manage their views.

Debbi Gibbs’s son Blake had one primary design requirement: bunk beds. Specifically, he wanted "two sets of single bunks, one on each side, with a bridge over the top." Gibbs says the Venetian-style arched bridge connecting the two beds exceeded her expectations: "I was expecting a flat platform, but our builder decided to take Blake’s request (to connect them) and made him his very own Bridge of Sighs."

A lofted sleeping pod offers a bit of privacy and helps maximize space. Beneath it is a zippy yellow bathroom.

Architect Bergendy Cooke, who worked for Zaha Hadid and Peter Marino before returning to her home country in 2007, is an admirer of the strong, sculptural architectural forms that appear in Japanese and Spanish architecture. Outside Queenstown, she put her ideas into practice in a home that would be the benchmark for bc+a studio, her own venture. The combination bunk bed and playhouse is a whimsical gesture the architect designed specifically for her two daughters. The spaces are organized in such a way that they can play independently or together.