The walnut staircase and slide in a Chicago town house leads from the main level to the basement. To protect people on the ride down, a “crash pad” fashioned from a standard gymnastic mat covers the wall at the slide’s base.

Built in the early 1970s, the house's kitchen, living, and dining areas were originally divided into three distinct zones. In order for this great room to flow as one, Klopf Architecture removed the glass doors and solid walls separating the enclosed atrium from the kitchen and living room. A Herman Miller trade poster, Design Within Reach book tower, and IKEA sofa mingle in the space.

Light cascades into the living room through a row of six insulated timber windows on the south wall. The north wall flares out to create what Schaer calls a sunset scoop. “It grabs the late afternoon and evening sun and brings it deep into the space,” he explains.

Bamboo flooring and custom built-ins—fashioned from medium-density fiberboard with a white-lacquer finish—brightened Gavin and Sheila Smith’s 650-square-foot attic. Gavin Smith designed the blackened-steel balustrade, which has cable inserts and a walnut handrail.

The compact rental features plenty of wooden ledges, nooks, and shelves for keeping belongings organized. In the living room, a low white wall is capped with fir wood salvaged from the garage’s former posts. On the east wall, a half-door made of reclaimed cedar looks out on a garden. “It looks and lives a lot bigger than it is,” Schaer says.

The updated kitchen features a bright white palette. The countertop is Caesarstone's Blizzard surface and the stools are Crate and Barrel. The range hood is Futuro, the refrigerator is LG, and the dishwasher is Bosch.

The master bathroom gains light through the skylight as well as morning light through windows on the east side.

Studio VARA explains “the project’s success lies in the judicious use of carefully executed moments," such as wood screen that recreates the privacy of now-trimmed tree branches. Studio VARA also cites a "subtle palette of ‘warm’ mixed with ‘cool’ that recurs in both tone and materials: wood juxtaposed with glass, metal against stone.”

All the floors were redone in a light ash hardwood. The crisp interior paint is Benjamin Moore Super White. The kitchen cabinets are from Artistic Kitchens. A frosted glass door leads to the laundry room.

The modern layout creates a fun place to get ready each day.

Open risers and glass railings maintain an open flow of space.

The master bedroom takes advantage of the extra high ceilings in order to create a quiet retreat space.

A Boston loft in a former textile factory receives a minimal, efficient kitchen at the hands of Bunker Workshop. In the kitchen, the island features a stainless-steel countertop with a gas cooktop, oven, and a brick half wall.

Smith designed the custom cabinets, which were fashioned from medium-density fiberboard with a white lacquer finish. There are three drawer heights. "The faces are consistent but some, when you open them up, are triple-height," Smith says. "So that helps with things that are really large, like sleeping bags or camping stuff or whatever. They're three feet deep, so it goes into the knee wall, which is really handy. So you get lots and lots of storage."

During the historical review period of the permitting process, Curtiss learned the house was previously owned by three generations of the same family — a fact that deeply informed how she approached the remodel. “We wanted [the family] to drive by and feel like, ‘Oh cool, look what they did to our old house,’” she said, explaining her decision to preserve the house’s original shape. As a reminder of its previous life, workers sandblasted the original floorplate and left it exposed to reveal “the history of little conduit holes drilled before.” They also utilized old framing members when molding the concrete retaining walls in the yard, literally “imprinting the building’s history into the walkways.”

Keeping and eye on costs - the kitchen remained in the original location, but was updated to fit the new aesthetic. The kitchen maintains a visual connection to backyard through the adjacent dining room.

This staircase connects the common area to the guest suites above and the wine cellar below. The interplay of glass and metal on the handrails is a one of the architects’ favorite details.

From the northeast corner of the master bedroom, the homeowners can walk out onto a deck area to enjoy the view of the woods.

Schaer replaced the garage’s crumbling wooden posts with an earthquake-resistant steel frame. He also excavated beneath the building, establishing a basement level for a workshop, storage, laundry, and water heater. The earth removed in the process was shoveled into concrete “boxes” in the yard. These form a raised terrace from which you can see the Olympic mountains.

For the master bathroom, Moser installed a green marble bath top and green onyx floor tiles. Details such as in-floor heating, an Americh Madison bathtub, and GROHE sink make for a comfortable space.

A utilitarian core contains the kitchen, bathroom, closet, and loft ladder. The kitchen’s walls are clad with recycled wooden boards trimmed with horizontal battens that hide the oven and refrigerator from view.

In addition to adjusting the windows, Carle dislocated all wall partitions from the main structure of the house to create a more open feel. “This way, we’re going back to the mythical plan libre dogma of those days, as a wink to our ancestors,” the French-Canadian architect jokes.

The original design did not exploit the lower part of the house, so Carle added a bar and lounge area facing the lake at the ground level. He also installed water-based geothermal heating in the basement. “It allows the concrete floor to be heated and to generate most of the heating of the house, while a second smaller air pump assures a supplement of air on the ground floor and air conditioning for summer.”

We bumped out the entry to create a more comfortable progression from outside to in, broke down the wall to the stair, and stacked the new stair to the stair directly above it.

Originally a nondescript single story home, the owners hoped to add both a second story as well as a new modern sensibility to their home. Deep exaggerated eaves on the east and west sides provide visual interest as well as shading during the summer months.

The 1Light pendants above the kitchen island are from Eurofase.

Designer Kim Nadel created a new interior in a renovated and expanded ranch-style house in Cardiff by the Sea, California, that reflects the resident's love of yoga and its seaside setting.

Photo of the home of Interior Architect Curtis Popp (curtispopp.com). The home is located in the Land Park area of Sacramento.

A Mahjong sofa by Hans Hopfer for Roche Bobois is the defining feature of the living room. Its sections can be configured in any number of ways without scuffing the walnut floors.

The bathrooms also feature glass mosaic tiles from Sonoma Tilemakers.

The renovated house has three full bathroom suites, each of which is outfitted with a custom wall-mounted walnut vanity and EuroStone countertops with inlaid shells.

Nadel designed the storage unit, with minimalist shelving, that separates the living room from the diding area. She chose the wallpaper for its 1970s look, figuring that it would be the perfect backdrop for the Buddha statue and some of the Indian artifacts that the resident has collected.

Nadel designed the custom cabinets throughout the apartment, combining white paint and ribbon-patterened walnut veneer.

The floors are custom wide-planked, Forest Stewardship Council-certified walnut.

Nadel used large-format custom matte glass Chiaro tiles for the kitchen backsplash.

Austin architect J.C. Schmeil converted his family's 1935 bungalow into a spacious modern family home on a modest budget and with tons of ingenuity. A dormer on the south side of the house contains two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms features a reading loft carved out of the attic space above the dining room. The intersection of the gabled roof and the shed dormers allowed us to wrap large windows around each corner, taking advantage of the "borrowed landscape"—treetop views that root the house to its site.