In the office, existing track lighting illuminates cabinetry covered in Lemon Bar by Miller Paint.

The price is right.

The cover of Inside Tracks.

Architect Christine Djerrahian turns an industrial space into an unconventional family dwelling that celebrates open-concept living.

Drawing inspiration from Japanese contemporary architecture, Jorge Alonso Albendea of Zooco Estudio gave this home in Madrid a modern and minimalist aesthetic. The kitchen features a waxed concrete floor and Muji-esque cabinets, lighting, and counters.

Smart Body Analyzer by Withings, $150 Weight alone isn’t a sufficient metric for gauging health. This scale will tell you your body fat percentage and heart rate—and can even detect carbon dioxide. Sync the data to the Withings Health Mate app to create a full health profile.

With its app, Sunn allows users to select any time and location, and the light will track the patterns of the sun accordingly. Trying to ignore the gray weather outside? Users can also select which season they'd like the light to reflect.

A spread from Inside Tracks featuring images from the film, Tracks.

Drawing inspiration from Japanese contemporary architecture, Jorge Alonso Albendea gave the home a modern and minimalist aesthetic.

Classic mid-century furniture like the Eames lounge chair in Cohen’s bedroom populate the home, a nod to his long life in architecture.

Only a set of sliding doors separates the kids’ room from the master bedroom in a Toronto, Ontario, home. When the time is right, there's a track inlaid in the ceiling for a four-panel bifold wall to divide the space into two private rooms for the children. Read the whole story here.

This urban home comprises a series of buildings that frame internal courtyards, and the entire property is cited around a single oak as the centerpiece. As neighbors were in close proximity, the goal was to create a sense of privacy while also making the space feel larger. To achieve this, the home extends to the outer edges of three sides in a U-shaped garden wall, encompassing the trees, pool, and main living quarters. On the east side of the lot is a wooded area. Adding an industrial touch is the concrete, barrel-vaulted ceiling in the kitchen.

The Bulthaup kitchen also features Calacatta quartzite countertops from Stone Fleury. A Float console table by Aleksandra Zee hangs along a wall opposite the bar stools.

The living lounge opens to a small balcony.

The cup's 13-ounce interior tracks your consumption and issues suggestions accordingly—for example, once you input your height, weight, gender, and other metrics, the Vessyl will tell you how much water you need for a day’s worth of hydration. If you’re hitting the soft drinks, it’ll show how much sugar you’ve consumed as well.

The interior is insulated like a travel mug to keep drinks at the desired temperature.

A spread from Inside Tracks featuring Smolan's photograph of Davidson in the Australian outback.

View to backyard

How did you come to work with Make It Right? About six years ago I was at a firm in Kansas City called BNIM and we were doing disaster recovery projects. I was working in a little rural Kansas town called Greensburg after a Tornado leveled the town. Make It Right asked BNIM to design one of its early first-round houses for New Orleans so I traveled down there a few times. It became apparent that Make It Right could use a bit of landscape architecture and planning insight as they looked to build a sustainable community in the Lower Ninth Ward. I took a year's sabbatical and left the prairie and moved down to the swamps and had an amazing time with Make It Right. That turned into five-plus years of work with the organization. How did Make It Right come to work in Kansas City? As the Make it Right model began to evolve there was an interest to propagate the expertise and resources developed in New Orleans to other communities. There might not be a natural disaster involved—so many urban cores are faced with economic disasters. We started to look to other communities and develop Make It Right's strategic plan. The stars aligned in Kansas City with a political structure wanting to create this area called the "Green Impact Zone" and looking to focus investment in urban revitalization under the umbrella of sustainable redevelopment.

Can you tell us about the area around the project? How did it fall into decline? What's the make-up of the community now? Our project sits on a street called Troost Avenue. Starting in the late '50s and early '60s with the removal of the street car, suburban sprawl, and other elements, Troost became the de facto racial dividing line in the city—the other side of the tracks literally. The avenue runs over 90 blocks and has a straight shot in Kansas City and whether it was reality or perception, it's been a significant problem to overcome in Kansas City's current history. Quite a few groups have been lobbying hard for ways to change that perception and ways to figure out how investment can occur in that area. A house once block east of Troost is valued at half the price as what that same house one block west of Troost would be valued. Many cities have Troost avenues. Many cities have a racial dividing line—just 95 blocks of them being a straight line is not always the case.

Can you tell us a little about what the "Green Impact Zone" is? We use a phrase called "urban acupuncture." So many times in urban cores, communities never receive enough resources and when they do receive resources it's deployed in a scattered-sites approach. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver developed a vision to do the opposite of that: to define a boundary in an area that needs revitalization and be strategic in that investment until the area becomes sustainable once again. So there was a defined area, 150 square blocks, and it became apparent where strategic investment would occur. It could be new infrastructure projects in the form of streets or sidewalks, or a smart grid development for the infrastructure, or housing, or funding getting routed to the city services in this area. The idea is to really focus investment in an area and see what can happen when everyone gets the resources they need. We were the first project out of the gate and since that moment, over 110 million dollars of investment has been strategically diverted within a half-mile walkable radius of the project site so that it can become a sustainable neighborhood again. That's the core idea: the project becoming a catalytic force in an urban core.

Can you walk us through how you designed the structures? Here at Dwell we're very friendly toward modern buildings but is that something where you received any pushback from the neighborhood? We were fortunate in terms of aesthetics in that we had a historical building and we laid out from the very start if we have to do new construction, our boss is a modernist at heart and we would propose contemporary housing options as opposed to what I'll call "imitation crab meat." We didn't want to try and recreate the beautiful architecture that was completed over 100 years ago because it would always just look fake. That being said, we wanted a contemporary design and looked to the neighborhood for scale, materiality, color palette, and other elements in terms of the architecture and walking the community though the process coupled with the big idea and vision, we didn't get as much resistance as one would have anticipated. But because the process was very transparent it worked out really well. We have this nice contrast of old and new.

The project's core is near a school that was empty for the past 13 years. Is vacancy an issue in the area as well? How did you select the project site? In the neighborhood, Manheim Park, 30 percent of the area for contains vacant lots or dangerous buildings. One block west of Troost it's much much different—maybe five percent vacant if that. We knew that we wanted it to be adjacent to public transportation nodes, we knew that we wanted it to be of a scale of existing buildings or of new construction, and we knew that we wanted to be part of a community that needed a hand up instead of a hand out. And all of that analysis lead to a couple of different sites in the Green Impact Zone. We went into GIS and mapped buildings over 10,000 square feet and transit nodes and then we overlaid vacant properties and the Bancroft just kind of emerged out of that mapping process. And we said, ok, the Bancroft school is one block away from rapid transit, it's one block from mixed-use retail that could be revitalized. It had the proper zoning, it had the proper access, it had a big enough scale building to be a catalyst and to be a visionary from the start. If we're going to walk out and be the first project in the area, we had to make a loud bang.

Throughout the home, the walls and floors feature the natural grain patterns of lacquered plywood. The Stokke Tripp Trapp chair in the dining room was Lizz’s when she was growing up in the 1980s while the two Steen Ostergaard chairs were a thrift store find, and Project Room designed the table.

The lattice-like bookcase separating the living room and family room is part of a design approach that Cristián says “blurs the line between building and furniture.” The walls and floors are concrete in all of the units.

Track and spotlights are fixtures that are attached to a track that is mounted to the ceiling or hung off the ceiling, depending on the fixture.

Don't worry if you aren't quite sure where to start. With this eight-step guide, your space will be sparkling in no time.

A different pattern by Fabrica de Mosaicos covers the floor in the dining area. Adding texture, the concrete ceiling slab bears the imprint of the wood formwork used to create it. Next to the dining table is an enameled black-and-gold cast-iron Venax stove. - Pato Branco, Brazil Dwell Magazine : November / December 2017