For your next trip, consider stepping back in time to Lina Bo Bardi’s midcentury Casa de Vidro in São Paulo, or maybe follow Californian Dennis Severs to London, where he turned a townhouse into an 18th-century storybook. Or Eileen Gray’s 1920s home on the French Riviera might be more your speed. All are ready for your visit.

101 Spring Street

New York City

I first toured 101 Spring Street, Donald Judd’s five-story, cast-iron former family home in SoHo, New York City, a decade ago, while on a date with a filmmaker who practiced transcendental meditation on the subway. Walking up the steps to the various restored floors, each designed to serve a different purpose, took us to new heights of intellectual rapture. Here was neither the cold severity one finds at art institutions like the Dia Beacon, nor a monument to wealth, like some other historic homes. Instead, in tours of small groups, one learns about Judd’s artistic ambitions, his conceptual experiments with space, his values—observing, thinking, reading, and drawing (swoon)—and how his young family once lived here.

Touring the home again for this article, I was still moved by details like the fresco painted by one of Judd’s artist friends, the floors that seem to float because of intentional gaps where they meet the walls, and Dan Flavin’s light installation, which runs along a wall of the “sleeping” floor, demanding that one pay attention to light, color, and space. —Suzanne LaGasa, creative director

The Block

Marfa, Texas

When I stepped through the adobe wall around the Block, Donald Judd’s home base from the 1970s until his death, the artist’s obsession with simplicity, symmetry, and proportion struck me. Pebbles stretch underfoot to every outdoor corner of the compound, which became Judd’s primary residence in 1977, and the unadorned structures take on some of the gravity of the work that they hold inside. Standing along one of the two main thoroughfares that run through the 1,600-person town, the property takes up a full block—hence the name. Two large hangars house Judd’s library, a set of small rooms he and his family would use as winter accommodations when the Texas heat dissipated, and various sculptures from throughout his career. The family’s main house and a separate bathhouse stand a few paces away.

And while fans of the artist will find the hangars to be the stars of the show, the moments that demonstrate how Judd and his family lived are the most interesting to me. As with Judd’s prior home at 101 Spring Street in New York, the compound’s visual simplicity is perfectly interrupted and embellished by signs of life, from a tiny, well-loved kitchen to a hidden garden. The simple spaces were inspiration enough for the design giant, and that’ll keep me coming back for more. —Ian Zunt, visual media producer

Louis Armstrong House Museum

Queens, New York City

No two rooms are alike in the Queens, New York City, house that jazz legend Louis Armstrong shared with his wife, Lucille. A 1970s Chinese-themed dining room leads into a 1960s kitchen with lacquered wood cabinets painted a shade of blue inspired by Lucille’s beloved Cadillac. But what I find most remarkable about the house is how humble it is. As one of the world’s top entertainers, Armstrong could have lived anywhere. Yet, he and Lucille chose this modest two-story building in the working-class neighborhood of Corona, where they were an active part of the community, hanging out with neighbors on their front stoop and welcoming local kids inside to watch one of the first TVs on the block.

Walking from room to room in the small, intimate space, you get a sense of who Armstrong was as a person—funny, thoughtful, and full of love. And the many personal touches throughout the house—Lucille’s slippers by the bed, Louis’s half-finished bottles of liquor in the den—make it feel less like a museum and more of a real, lived-in home, as if the Armstrongs have just stepped out for a moment and might walk through the front door at any time. —Derek Eng, art director

Dennis Severs’s House

London, England

When I visited Dennis Severs’s house, on the advice of a friend, I took one of its silent candlelight tours. I was early, so I stopped for a pint at a pub around the block where an English rugby championship was on. From this loud, raucous setting, I walked back across the street and stepped into dimmed silence, the smell of coal-burning stoves and melting wax, and another time, though one totally imagined. My brain took a minute to adjust.

Severs was American. He was born in Southern California but became obsessed with London. In the late 1970s, he bought a crumbling Georgian townhouse in Spitalfields and set out turning it into a Gesamtkunstwerk, a narrative embodied in a meticulously assembled series of interiors filled with objects representing different periods in the life of the Jervis family, fictional French Huguenot weavers in the early 18th century. The story starts in the basement, where a kitchen contains a large fireplace and shelves overflow with period porcelain. It follows on successive floors, charting generations of the family passing from prosperity into poverty.

On the top floor you hear church bells heralding the ascent of Queen Victoria as you enter a tattered bedroom. It’s the first break in the silence since you entered the house. You can feel the family’s ruin in your body. The home’s physical fiction—of objects, sound, and smell—and Severs’s obsessive curation make this one of my favorite houses in the world. —William Hanley, editor-in-chief

E1027

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

I have been obsessed with E1027, the 1,400-square-foot beach house designed by Irish architect Eileen Gray, for a long time. With its industrial materials and pared-down geometry—a white, ship-like box perched over the Mediterranean on the Côte d’Azur—and forward-looking details, it represents the values of early modernism that I look for today.

The house was designed by Gray for herself and her partner Jean Badovici and completed in 1929. (The serial number of a name references their initials.) The plan is simple, but the forwardly functional moves really enthrall me. For example, all of the electrical wires are exposed and strung taut along the walls. Gray insisted on far more electrical outlets than were common at the time—let alone in a place that had only recently gotten electricity. (The house also has the best mirrored bathtub you’ll ever see.) It’s filled with furniture by Gray—don’t miss the record player—including her famous side table named for the house.

The house is a must-visit, first for the architecture but also for the fact that it was designed by a woman practicing in a profession that is, nearly a century later, woefully bro-ish.

After Gray and Badovici moved out, Le Corbusier famously took up residence, painting murals on several of the walls—if you’ve seen the photo of him painting alfresco in the nude, he’s on the house’s patio. Gray called it an act of vandalism.

The house is a must-visit, first for the architecture but also for the fact that it was designed by a woman practicing in a profession that is, nearly a century later, woefully bro-ish. A recent restoration is faithful to the original, with contemporary craftspeople re-creating long-derelict details. The result feels livable, rather than precious, and you can imagine yourself relaxing inside its still-radical design. —WH

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Kawai Kanjirō’s House

Kyoto, Japan

Ambling through Kyoto’s Higashiyama Ward, I came across a two-story traditional machiya, or townhouse, with chocolate-colored lattices and a row of arched bamboo inuyarai, or fences, in front. This is the home of Kawai Kanjirō, which he built in 1937.

Kanjirō was a celebrated potter in the early 20th century. He was part of the Mingei art movement, which celebrates the folk art creations of anonymous craftspeople. His house evokes the humble dignity of the movement. The first thing that struck me was the light—sometimes tenebrous and intimate, other times exhilarating and abundant. I spotted a resident cat fast asleep on the tatami, bathing in the sun’s warmth.

Kanjirō was a master of glazing. His ceramics—round, pinched, angular; jade green, burnt sienna, and black as night—sit pretty in a glass cabinet. His calligraphy animates walls, and fresh flowers give the home the feeling of being lived in.

Wandering behind the house, I found Kanjirō’s majestic eight-chamber noborigama kiln. His tools, pottery wheel, apparatuses, and unfinished pieces were still there—was the artist still around, just taking a break?
—Jingmei Luo, writer

Casa de Vidro

São Paulo, Brazil

The steps shake a little as you climb into the light. Lina Bo Bardi built her house made of glass on the top of a hill, an observation deck looking to the world outside drenched in tropical sunlight. Blue tiles on the floor create reflecting pools, the sky liquefied and turned upside down, splashing against the windows from floor to ceiling. This diamond of a house, a prism that refracts, reflects, and reshapes the forest all around it, a tree growing through its structure, sums up all the principles of her architecture. No tricks, no excess, just bare bones of concrete and glass that hover above nature and the accidents that feed life into everything.

Now a museum, the Casa de Vidro, in São Paulo, houses her archives, a shrine to the splendor of her genius. The wide, ample spaces, the horizon framed by her vitrines, are a testament to the generous vision of an architect who went beyond construction to make the fabric of her buildings an echo of all the existence surrounding them, things of beauty not otherworldly but of the earth, trees growing, breeze flowing. This is a jewel made to contemplate it all, posed gently on the ground in spectacular transparency. —Silas Martí, writer

Top photo by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, courtesy Dennis Severs’s House

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Our Favorite House Museums, From Kyoto to Queens