The house’s small square footage also necessitated that the bathroom do double duty as the laundry room.

“The upper floor includes the entry, cloakroom, guest bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, and terrace,” Hammer says. “In contrast to the lower floor and its separated rooms, the living area is composed as an open space with no walls.” Nerd Chairs by David Geckeler for Muuto surround a handcrafted nutwood table in the dining room.

“All interior walls were removed to create four individual rooms on the sixth floor,” Hammer says. The two children and the new baby share a bathroom. And in their bedrooms, storage continues to be key.

Dunbar and Astrakhan's low-cost, high-impact tour de force is a storefront facade constructed from salvaged double-insulated window glass panels arranged in a shingle pattern.

Heating for the unit is provided by a Spartherm fireplace, with electric heating integrated into the magnesite floor. Walls are insulated with fire-tested wool felt under plywood panels.

The L-shaped secondary building perches over a craggy escarpment. It offers the best vantage point for taking in the moss-planted roof, forest, and ocean.

It takes three to five days to install a Vipp Shelter onsite.

NOEM, a Barcelona–based architecture firm, created a metal-clad house for a young client just outside Madrid. It’s raised 12 feet off the ground to offer better views of the landscape, lending it "the futuristic feeling that it just landed," says Pol Guiu, one of NOEM’s cofounders.

“Perhaps the most recurrent request from the client was to create as much storage space as possible, which they desperately lacked in the original apartment,” Hammer says. The kitchen’s medium-density fibreboard cabinets provide plenty of room to keep things tidy. Tom Dixon bar lamps hang over the island.

The exterior features vertical, untreated cedar panels. “We tried to use materials that are beautiful in their natural state without excessive treatment or finishing,” Pavonetti says.

A former closet was transformed into a double-height library, complete with a reading nook and a rolling ladder from Spiral Stairs of America. “That’s my favorite part of the house,” says Dan. “When I see Stella reaching for a book, there’s nothing better.”

Large double-hung windows, like this one from Loewen, help illuminate the home's three stories.

An office nook and library can participate in the open plan or disappear behind pocket doors.

In 1962, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Arthur Witthoefft won the AIA's highest honor for a home he built in the lush woods of Westchester County. Having fended off a developer's wrecking ball, Todd Goddard and Andrew Mandolene went above and beyond to make this manse mint again.

Alex Gil and Claudia DeSimio created a duplex in an apartment building where they’d been renting for years in Brooklyn, New York, and set to work gutting the interior and adding a new rooftop addition clad in panels of Cor-Ten steel.

The second bedroom, shared by two young children, offers a private space away from the rest of the home. The owners and architect alike made sure to maintain the apartment’s original features, including the ceiling moldings.

Low-maintenance, sustainable materials were favored throughout the house. Striking orange Pirelli studded rubber floors were chosen for the main bathroom. Clean white fixtures and black shower cladding complete the graphic space.

A floor-to-ceiling wall unit accommodates a fridge, stove, oven, and convertible custom cabinetry. The pendant light is from the Multi Luminaire showroom in Pointe Claire, Quebec; the appliances are from Bosch and Miele.

Photo by Patrick Barta

This dreamy, glass bedroom by the lake was created as an early prototype for the prefabricated greenhouse/she kits known as the Kekkilä Green Sheds.

Helsinki architect Ville Hara and designer Linda Bergroth collaborated on a prefab shed-meets-sleeping cabin, which can be assembled with little else than a screwdriver. Bergroth, inspired by nomadic yurt dwellers, wanted an indoor/outdoor experience for her property in Finland.

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.

Six-inch-square blue tiles cover the walls and floor of the girls’ upstairs bathroom. The towels and rug are also by H&M Home.

Operable panels of the built-in cabinetry, in chocolate and caramel colors, offer cues to the color palette of more mobile furnishings. Using the same panel material, the architect customized a West Elm couch for the living room.

"How would a kid draw a house?" architect Per Franson asked himself when designing the Olivero-Reinius family home. The simple prefab structure’s unusual color comes from a traditional source: falu rödfärg, the historic mineral paint that gives the region’s famous barns their red color.

The inspiration for this prefabricated, modular family home on Fishers Island, New York, were the views that Tanney and Luntz saw from a 12-foot stepladder, which was balancing on the bed of a pickup truck when they first visited the site.

In the living area, a sliding door conceals the loft from the hallway leading to the office, thus opening the space up by revealing extra square footage in the bedroom. When it’s time for bed, the door slides shut for privacy.

Among the first Passive Houses in France, this bamboo-clad farmhouse by the Parisian firm Karawitz Architecture only uses a tenth of the energy a conventionally constructed home does. Photo by Nicholas Calcott.

A telescope looks out upon the Saint Petersburg cityscape.

The custom shoe cabinets at the top of the stairs double as a balustrade.

The lower floor houses a spa, gym, and office. A built-in bathroom by Espace Cuisine includes a sauna.

In an 850-square-foot loft in Montreal, Quebec–based firm Gepetto built understated, custom cabinetry to suit an aging couple's needs. Here, the Murphy bed that folds into a larger walnut storage unit. The wall, which also conceals a washer and dryer, does double duty as a partition between the bedroom and the loft’s entrance. Modern Murphy beds like this one often incorporate sleek lines constructed in dark-toned woods.

The perimetral circulations became into interior corridors

Their creative confections may ruin our diets, but we’re happy to be their taste testers anytime.

Light streams into the bedroom through walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. The windows are triple-glazed, creating a tight, eco-friendly seal.

In this sleek kitchen renovation in San Francisco, the kitchen backsplash is an easy-to-clean glass backsplash that mimics the glossy finish of the surrounding white cabinets. Painters accomplished the high-gloss finish on the cabinets of a kitchen in San Francisco by applying a coat of paint, polishing it with very high-grit sandpaper, repeating the process for each layer, then topping it with three coats of clear varnish. "It’s like an auto body," says builder Jeff King. "It’s incredibly beautiful." The island provides shelving space and storage as well as a second sink, an is topped with pietra grigio marble.