The designs might be minimal but the color palette is friendly.

A playful array of models and materials in the studio.

The Mango lounge chair for Danish brand WON.

The studio's Vinge table lamp lights up the space.

Architect William Carpenter, glimpsed in his second-floor design studio, built Lightroom 2.0 to sit unobtrusively among its 1920s neighbors in Decatur.

Exterior of the backyard studio Riley McFerrin of Hinterland Design built for his client, a children's book illustrator.

A covered walkway provides a sheltered passage between the main house and studio. The fire pit is used during social gatherings.

Note Design Studio incorporates Kvadrat fabric into a series of lighting for Zero. The Elements collection draws on the quality of "soft and gentle" light in Nordic mountains and includes a floor, wall, table, and pendant version.

Phillips designed Judith a stark white, glass-fronted art studio.

Technically, this small building is not a tree house, since it’s braced at the ground by supports, but Grey didn’t want to compromise the tree, which “doesn’t have a very long lifespan,” the designer says. “So, I didn’t want to jeopardize however long that tree had with any excess baggage.”

The sinuous interior is lined with CNC-cut wooden panels that define stepped sauna seating and porthole windows.

The sauna structure includes a small deck.

A 25-foot custom bifold door made of corrugated plastic and twin-wall polycarbonate encloses an artist’s studio designed by Marc Frohn of FAR frohn&rojas.

The ribbon-like design affords the building three different gable profiles—one is symmetrical, while the other two lean in opposite directions.

Rose’s pottery studio opens right up to the back lawn to let the sunlight (or curious pups) inside.

A wood-burning stove from Harvia, of Finland, heats the sauna. The pavilion’s rough-cut pine walls are treated with tar, a preservative that yields a time-worn aesthetic.

We tried to be very resourceful. You shouldn’t see any tile on the deck that had to be cut; it’s almost like a perfect puzzle,” comments the designer, Marc Frohn.

The sauna is named after Huginn and Muninn, two ravens from Norse mythology.

The structure is made entirely from treated pine, while its corrugated polycarbonate roof protects it from the elements.

Almo Troup repurposed nearly all of the materials from a tumbledown shack to create a dreamy, minimalist workspace in his backyard.

The Exbury Egg asks us to reexamine the way we live while carefully considering sustainability and the use of natural resources.

These tiny egg-shaped cabins are mounted onto small podiums to keep them stable.

The sauna door handle is a simple piece of driftwood. “One principle rule I followed,” says Kiehl, “was: Don’t build on outdoor space if it can work as outdoor living space. Norwegian summers are short. We want to be outdoors as much as possible.”

The LED lighting is encased in translucent poly-carbonate panels on top and bottom. Daylight streams through from the roof when the lights aren't on.

“I wanted to bring in a little bit of apricot to nod to the name of the studio,” says Troup of the $25 USD orange velvet curtain he hung as a space divider.

This "local prefab" home on the Isle of Skye is made mostly from materials sourced in northern Scotland. The timber-framed model, meant to evoke the simple agrarian barns of the area, can be constructed on-site in as little as a day and is designed for affordability.

Architect Christian Tonko played with a double metaphor when designing the Camera Lucida studio. The name of the cantileverd hillside space, Latin for "bright chamber," references the open window facing the valley below, as well as the skylight that bathes the workspace in natural light.

The roofline of the Tind house prototype, designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for prefab company Fiskarhedenvillan, has more conventional Swedish gables than the flat-roofed modernism of typical prefab units.

The living room is five steps down from the kitchen and office space and features textured black slate tile from Olympia Tile, Voyage Immobile sofas with Farniente collection upholstery (a wedding present from Flanders’s mother) by Roche Bobois, and a rug from Turkmenistan the couple picked up in Jerusalem. The sliding glass doors are by Loewen and the glazing above is by Inline Fiberglass. Sawatzky relied on Wayne Arsenault for the custom millwork and carpentry.

Protect your mini computers from the dreadful fall with the iCorkCase by pomm.design.studio. Made of two smooth, gently leveled cork parts, the iCorkCase was designed specifically for the iPad 2 and new iPad (3rd and 4th generation). Says pomm, “From the beginning we wanted to make something entirely new to revolutionize the standard products currently on the market."

Paolo Lucidi (1974) and Luca Pevere (1977) graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in Industrial Design and worked independently before establishing LucidiPevere Design Studio in 2006. They are currently designing across a range of materials and scales for companies like Gebrüder Tonet Vienna, Very Wood, Living Divani, Ligne Roset, Casamania, DeCastelli, Foscarini, Glass Idromassaggio, Normann Copenhagen, Comforty, and Kristalia.

Paloma Strelitz and James Binning, Assemble Studio Representing the young London collective Assemble, Paloma Strelitz and James Binning shared why it's important to be imaginative about what neglected urban spaces can be redeemed, showcasing work in former gas stations and underpasses. The pair's advice for designers just starting out: "Self-initiate projects, [or risk] coming to the table too late to ask the big questions."

The studio addition is part of a revamp that unifies buildings, canopies, and the courtyard. It was a three-year job for architect-owners Matt Wittman and Jody Estes, with many materials opportunistically salvaged.