Tag Archives: Architecture

House of Cards Quietly Turns an Old Foundation Into a Feature

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The most interesting part of House of Cards may be the part you cannot see. Vantieghem Talebi designed this family home in Koksijde, Belgium, on the foundations of an earlier coastal house, with a limit on how high the new building could rise. That combination can leave architects trying to disguise a compromise. Here, the inherited footprint gives the house its unusual shape. I like that the design begins with a problem it cannot simply erase.

The old foundation has an asymmetrical, cross-shaped layout. Instead of forcing a conventional box onto it, the architects developed each section into a distinct house-like form, creating the layered composition behind the name House of Cards. It looks playful, but the arrangement is rooted in the site rather than added for effect. That distinction matters: an expressive home is much easier to appreciate when its shape has a reason.

Designer: Vantieghem Talebi

The exterior is wrapped in finely detailed Douglas fir, giving the project a warmth that balances its sharp geometry. Timber could have been treated as a softening finish, something to make an unconventional building feel more approachable. In House of Cards, it has a more substantial role. The studio describes skin, structure, and space as parts of the same idea, so the surfaces you see feel closely tied to the building beneath them.

There is also a conversation with its surroundings. The steep roof angles recall the historic beach houses of the area, even as the overlapping forms give that familiar silhouette a different rhythm. I appreciate that approach more than a design that tries to stand apart from its neighbors at every opportunity. House of Cards has a clear point of view, but it still seems interested in belonging where it was built.

That makes the name especially fitting. A house of cards suggests something temporary, maybe even a little precarious, while this one is the result of working carefully through structural and zoning limits. The contrast gives the project a sense of humor without making it feel like a joke. From one angle, you might notice the recognizable outline of a pitched-roof home. From another, the intersecting volumes make you look again.

The architects also used prefabrication techniques in developing the structure and envelope. That detail is less immediately charming than the roofline, but it helps explain how an intricate design could be treated as a coherent whole. It would be easy to look at a house like this and see only a striking exterior. The more compelling story is how its construction, materials, and constraints were considered together from the start.

Of course, House of Cards is a custom home, not a ready-made answer for every aging property. An old foundation can present practical questions that a beautiful photograph will never settle, and unusual geometry is not automatically a better way to live. Still, the project makes a persuasive case for examining what a site already offers before assuming that a blank slate would produce a better design.

That idea feels particularly relevant when so many new homes borrow the same handful of visual cues. A pitched roof, timber cladding, a carefully composed profile: none of those elements is novel on its own. House of Cards gets its character from the way they respond to a specific footprint and a specific place. It suggests that familiarity and originality do not have to compete. Sometimes the recognizable shape is what makes the unexpected one legible.

I would love to know how the family experiences those intersecting forms from inside, beyond what the exterior can tell us. But even from the outside, the house offers a useful reminder. The conditions designers inherit are not always obstacles to overcome as quickly as possible. Given enough attention, an awkward starting point can become the detail that makes a home worth remembering.

The post House of Cards Quietly Turns an Old Foundation Into a Feature first appeared on Yanko Design.

5 Glass Homes Where the View Is the Room

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Transparent living has evolved from a futuristic idea into a defining feature of contemporary architecture. Glass homes have stepped beyond luxury statements and now represent a broader design philosophy centered on openness, natural light, and spatial continuity. In such homes, the boundary between the interior and the exterior becomes fluid, allowing nature, weather, and landscape to become part of everyday life.

This shift reflects modern architectural priorities such as minimalism, wellness, and experiential space-making, where architecture is not just seen but deeply felt.

1. The Shift Toward Openness in Residential Design

Modern residential architecture is steadily moving away from enclosed, compartmentalized layouts toward open and visually connected spaces. Glass plays a key role in this transformation by replacing solid partitions with transparent surfaces. This allows uninterrupted views, enhanced daylighting, and a stronger connection to the surrounding environment.

Homes feel more expansive, even in limited footprints, as visual barriers are reduced. Designers now prioritize spatial continuity, ensuring that each area flows naturally into the next while maintaining a sense of harmony between privacy and openness.

Glass remains one of architecture’s most psychologically complex materials. It suggests transparency yet produces ambiguity, appears light while demanding advanced structural logic, and can make a building feel present or erased depending on the viewpoint and light. Since Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851, architects have pursued these contradictions. F-House on Lake Washington, designed by Goble Berriman Design with Pulp Studio, extends this pursuit into a radical private residence conceived as a literal crystal home.

Its lineage connects Mies, Johnson, and contemporary facade experimentation, yet its form abandons orthogonality for faceted geometry resembling a cut mineral. The 7,300-square-foot home sits amid Pacific Northwest rock and forest, with Mount Rainier beyond the lake, heightening contrast between natural softness and crystalline edges. Advanced glazing systems, hidden steelwork, and VR-based design coordination enable livability, privacy, and performance, turning an extreme concept into a precisely engineered residential environment for contemporary residential glass architecture practice and discourse.

2. Glass as a Structural and Aesthetic Material

Glass has transitioned from being a decorative element to a fundamental architectural material. With advancements in engineering, reinforced, laminated, and insulated glass can now support large-scale structural applications, including walls, façades, and roofing systems. This enables buildings that appear light, floating, and almost immaterial in character.

Aesthetically, glass introduces clarity and elegance while interacting dynamically with light and surroundings. Its reflective and transparent qualities allow architecture to change throughout the day, creating a living, responsive visual experience.

Nestled in Venhuizen, Noord-Holland in north-western Netherlands, this greenhouse-style glass home offers a striking alternative to conventional holiday stays. Located about forty-five minutes from Amsterdam, it was designed in 2020 by Dutch-German couple Marielle and Tobias of Familie Buitenhuys and is available for short-term rent on Airbnb. The concept prioritizes transparency, light, and a seamless connection with the surrounding landscape.

Inside, the design blurs boundaries between indoors and outdoors through extensive glass walls and a pared-back aesthetic. Minimal furniture and a neutral palette ensure the landscape remains the focal point while enhancing the sense of openness and scale. The open-plan bedroom allows guests to sleep beneath the night sky, complemented by a vanity, washbasin, and a fireplace for warmth. Simple white curtains provide privacy without blocking daylight.

3. Natural Light and Energy Efficiency Benefits

One of the most significant advantages of glass-based architecture is the extensive use of natural light. Large glazed surfaces reduce dependency on artificial lighting during the day, contributing to energy efficiency and lower electricity consumption. Interiors remain bright, uplifting, and visually open throughout the day.

Modern glazing technologies, such as double glazing and low-emissivity coatings, help regulate indoor temperatures by minimizing heat gain or loss. As a result, glass homes achieve a balance between aesthetic transparency and environmental performance.

The Efjord Cabin is a triple-glazed glass residence located on Hallvardøy Island in northern Norway, designed by Snøhetta Stinessen Architecture for a newlywed couple who chose to build their honeymoon home rather than stay in a traditional resort. Frode Danielsen and Tone Beathe Øvrevoll spent two years on the island after their initial visit, eventually shaping a permanent dwelling that reflects personal intent and deep respect for the surrounding landscape.

Before construction, the couple worked with the Ballangen municipality to establish zoning for the previously undeveloped site, selecting a naturally flat area to minimize environmental disturbance. Snorre Stinessen Architecture shaped the design as a dialogue between rock formations, climate, and views, prioritizing privacy and indoor-outdoor continuity.

The cabin is split into two angular volumes: one containing bedrooms and a sauna, the other an open-plan living space. Built on a concrete slab and wrapped in 14 tons of triple-glazed glass, the home uses insulation and passive solar positioning to balance transparency with energy efficiency in extreme northern conditions.

4. Privacy Challenges and Smart Solutions

Despite its visual appeal, transparency introduces challenges related to privacy. Architects address this issue through innovative design strategies such as frosted or tinted glass, layered façades, strategic landscaping, and retractable shading systems. Smart glass technology further enhances adaptability by allowing surfaces to switch between transparent and opaque modes on demand.

These solutions ensure that occupants can enjoy openness when desired and privacy when needed, maintaining a flexible living environment that responds to changing daily requirements.

Iceland’s vast, untouched landscapes and extremely low population density make traditional architectural boundaries feel almost unnecessary. In this context, solid walls and closed ceilings often work against the experience of place, interrupting views rather than framing them. With nature already forming the dominant visual and emotional environment, architecture shifts toward subtraction, prioritizing openness over enclosure.

The Panorama Glass Lounge embraces this philosophy through an all-glass design that dissolves the boundary between interior and landscape. Instead of relying on decorative interiors, the structure allows the surroundings to define the space itself. The bedroom is fully glazed, opening uninterrupted views of mountains, sky, and shifting light conditions.

At night, it becomes a transparent shelter for watching the Aurora Borealis, turning the sky into a living, constantly changing backdrop that replaces the need for any artificial interior “feature.”

5. Emotional and Lifestyle Impact of Transparent Living

Transparent living has a notable impact on how occupants emotionally experience space. Continuous exposure to natural light and outdoor views creates a sense of openness, calmness, and psychological ease. Environments feel less confined and more connected to nature, supporting a balanced lifestyle.

At the same time, the visibility of interiors encourages simplicity and intentional living, as clutter becomes visually prominent. This architectural approach aligns with modern wellness-driven design principles that emphasize clarity, mindfulness, and harmony with the environment.

Salt Spring Island already carries its own architectural narrative through cliffs, meadows, and dense tree cover, making any built intervention more about response than assertion. At Daisy Ranch, Olson Kundig, led by design principal Tom Kundig, works with this pre-existing landscape rather than competing with it. The result is a residence that feels grounded, restrained, and deeply tied to its natural setting, where the design attitude is less about spectacle and more about measured integration.

The house is organized as a clear linear composition, composed of two distinct volumes connected along an eastern entry axis. A rugged glass pavilion anchors one side, paired with a long cantilevered roof that extends over an open deck, creating shelter without interrupting openness. Materiality drives the expression: log structure, weathered steel, and glass work together to soften and layer the building against its meadow edge. Inside, wood-heavy interiors and carefully framed openings maintain privacy while still allowing controlled visual access to the landscape, including a clawfoot tub positioned to face corner glazing.

Transparent living reflects a shift toward openness, light, and landscape-driven design, where glass homes dissolve boundaries and redefine modern architecture as a seamless dialogue between interior life and nature.

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This 20-Foot Tiny Home on Wheels Proves Better Design Beats More Square Footage

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Not every home needs to shout to be heard. Highlands Tiny Homes, based in New South Wales, has built that idea into every corner of the Sierra — a single-level tiny home on wheels that measures just 6 meters in length and does absolutely nothing to apologize for it. It sits on a double-axle trailer and wears its compact footprint like a statement, not a compromise.

The exterior leans into a woodland aesthetic without overdoing it. A pitched corrugated roof, aluminium sash windows, and a considered combination of cladding and Colorbond accents give the Sierra a look that feels rooted — visually grounded in its surroundings regardless of where it’s parked. It’s the kind of exterior that photographs well in a pine clearing or beside a mountain road, reading more like an architect’s bush retreat than a prefab box.

Designer: Highlands Tiny Homes

Inside, the single-floor layout prioritizes openness over segmentation. White walls reflect the natural light that pours in through generously sized windows, while wooden countertops and bar seating in the kitchen add warmth without clutter. A ceiling fan overhead keeps things casual. The Sierra isn’t chasing the maximalist tiny-home trend of stacking every possible feature into the ceiling — it’s lean by design, and that restraint is exactly what makes it feel livable.

The kitchen claims a meaningful portion of the floor plan, which signals a priority worth noting: this is a home built for people who actually cook, not just for people who want to say they live small. The double bed doubles as a day bed and lounge area, keeping the space flexible without demanding a furniture reconfiguration every morning. The bathroom includes a glass-enclosed shower that feels considered rather than an afterthought.

Priced from US$59,000 including GST, the Sierra 6.0 sits at an entry point that makes serious compact living genuinely accessible. For those needing slightly more room, a 7.2-meter version is also available – same DNA, a little more breathing room.

The Sierra isn’t designed to impress at a trade show. It’s designed to work on a Tuesday morning when you’re making coffee and watching the light move across a wooden countertop. Highlands Tiny Homes has found a rhythm in the Sierra that many larger builds never quite locate — the specific calm that comes from a space that knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything else.

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A 1908 New York building’s discarded fragments got turned into furniture instead of being demolished

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A renovation across the street from Rafael Prieto’s studio offered an unusually good view of his next project. As decorative pieces came off the facade of a Tribeca building, he arranged to save sixteen that were headed for disposal. Most of us would have watched the scaffolding go up and returned to our emails. Prieto, a Mexico-born designer and creative director based in Tribeca, had other ideas. The result is a furniture exhibition that keeps the building’s ornament alive in some very unexpected forms.

Prieto spent time with the fragments before turning them into the starting point for tables, chairs, and sculptural objects. Weathered ornament sits against painted birch, sometimes tucked inside a crisp new frame. The resulting furniture keeps its New York address close, even when its shape heads somewhere unexpected. Some pieces carry the actual stone; others borrow only its curves, grooves, and proportions. It is a show that rewards looking twice.

Designer: Rafael Prieto

The building across the street is 366 Broadway, now known as Collect Pond House, a twelve-story Beaux-Arts structure designed by Frederick C. Browne in 1908. It was once home to the Royal Typewriter Company, then became a residential co-op in 1979. The facade is densely ornamented: copper cornices, Greek key detailing, marble columns, and keystones carved into bearded faces that have been watching Tribeca change for over a century. A recent multi-year restoration replaced and conserved 65 terra cotta units. A handful of the pieces removed during that process did not make it back onto the building.

Before cutting anything, Prieto lived with the fragments in his studio for roughly a year and a half. He photographed and scanned each contour and ornament, then layered those images to pull out shapes and combinations that could inform new work. That process produced a design vocabulary rather than any direct copy of the originals. The stepped, ribbed profiles that climb the legs of the red lacquered chair came directly from this translation, somewhere between column fluting and abstracted skyline. It is a method closer to archaeology than furniture-making.

One of the standout pieces has a large carved stone cornice block sitting below a flat black painted tabletop, doing actual structural work. The stone is pale, dense, and loaded with repeating scroll forms, carrying roughly a century of New York weather on its surface. Another piece cages a smaller fragment between vertical black bars inside a cube-shaped form, the stone visible through the gaps like something on display. The medium listing for several works at the gallery confirms “Architectural Fragment” as a named material alongside painted birch. Not every piece carries original stone; some borrow only its shapes.

The all-red lacquered chair is the most confident piece in the show, its legs built from stacked, stepped planes that scanning and layering pulled from 366 Broadway’s fluted piers and molded profiles. Its natural birch counterpart deploys the same vocabulary in warm wood, swapping lacquer for grain and adding red geometric arm brackets at the joints. A console table makes the argument most literally: one end sits on a fabricated red plinth, the other rests on an actual salvaged Ionic stone volute, intact and weather-stained. The two supports are not supposed to match. The gallery describes this contrast as the central thread: the hard and the soft, the historic and the contemporary, running through every piece.

Several of the original keystones sit on the gallery floor unaltered, including one carved bearded face in a plumed helmet still stained with moss and a century of city air. Prieto’s analog photography wraps the walls in large-scale architectural murals, produced in collaboration with Wallpaper Projects. The room ends up feeling closer to a photographed ruin than a white-cube gallery, which is entirely the point. He told Family Style that “New York is its architecture,” and that most people talk about the skyline but “don’t look up.” The show does the looking for you.

‘The Future of the Past’ is Prieto’s second solo show with Emma Scully Gallery and runs through December 12 at the Upper East Side location, open Wednesday through Saturday. Pricing and availability are through the gallery directly. The question the collection keeps circling is whether furniture shaped by a building’s discarded ornament carries any of that building’s memory with it. Prieto does not seem interested in settling that question cleanly. The bearded face on the gallery floor looks like he has made his peace with the whole situation.

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The Jamison 8.4 Is What Happens When a Tiny Home Refuses to Act Small

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Tiny living has a reputation problem — and it’s mostly earned. The Jamison 8.4 by Highlands Tiny Homes is here to dismantle it. Built by the Canberra-based builder and described by the brand itself as “the ideal choice for luxury,” the Jamison doesn’t shrink from ambition. It leans straight into it.

The first thing that stops you is the glass. Not a few tasteful windows, but an almost unreasonable amount of glazing stretched across a single-level frame that measures 8.4 meters (27.5 feet) long and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) wide. The effect is immediate — the interior reads as open, bright, and connected to whatever landscape surrounds it. Blinds are available when privacy calls, but the default is transparency, and that choice says a lot about what Highlands was designing toward.

Designer: Highlands Tiny Homes

The exterior holds its own. Black standing seam metal wraps the structure cleanly, broken only by warm wooden trim and the kind of proportions that make the home look deliberate rather than compact. It sits on a custom triple-axle trailer that Highlands builds in-house, rated for 4,500 kg — which means this is engineered to the same standard as it’s styled. Shown with an optional deck extending the footprint outward, the Jamison blurs the line between mobile home and considered retreat.

Step inside and the material palette shifts to wood and vinyl flooring — warm, tactile, and easy to maintain. The single bedroom is where the design gets most interesting, making confident use of every centimeter without resorting to loft bunks or hidden compartments. The bathroom includes a glass-enclosed shower, vanity sink, and a flushing toilet — small in scale, but not in execution.

What Highlands has built with the Jamison is a home that understands its audience. This is not a weekend camping experiment or an entry-level minimalist starter pack. It’s a considered object for someone who has already decided that less square footage doesn’t mean less life. The price reflects that — starting from US$83,500  — but so does every decision made along the way.

The Jamison 8.4 arrived in a crowded category and made its case quietly, through proportion, light, and material honesty. In a space where “tiny” often becomes an excuse for cutting corners, this one reads as the opposite — a home that treats its own constraints as a design brief worth solving well.

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This Mexican Beach House Swapped Glass Walls for Concrete and Palm — and Won

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On the sandy shores of Puerto Escondido, a house sits quietly and dares you to want less. It draws its DNA from local monasteries and haciendas — not as pastiche, but as a genuine reckoning with how people have always lived on this stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast. The result is something that feels simultaneously ancient and completely of its moment: a building that reads as ruin and refuge at the same time.

Exposed concrete forms the structural backbone of the project, but Anonimous never lets it feel cold. Planted courtyards punctuate the plan, pulling light and greenery into the heart of the house, while a green roof softens what would otherwise be a hard, monolithic silhouette. The dialogue between the man-made and the grown is constant — every room feels like it’s negotiating with the landscape rather than ignoring it.

Designer: Anonimous

The showpiece is the palapa: a 20-meter-long, 12-meter-wide thatched roof constructed from parota wood and local palm. It’s the kind of element that could easily tip into theme-park territory, but here it reads as structurally and culturally inevitable — a direct reference to vernacular building traditions that have been managing Pacific coast heat for centuries. Beneath it, the spaces breathe. The heavy concrete base and the light, fibrous canopy above create exactly the kind of contrast Anonimous seems most interested in: openness against closure, mass against weightlessness, stillness against the constant movement of the ocean beyond.

Upstairs, a rooftop plunge pool frames views of the Pacific through concrete beams, turning what could be a gratuitous amenity into something almost architectural — a framed picture of sky and water that changes with every hour of the day. Terraces and balconies extend naturally from the interiors, blurring the line between inside and outside until that distinction stops mattering altogether.

Casa Copycha isn’t trying to impress you with spectacle. It works through atmosphere — through the sound of waves filtered by palm thatch, through the play of dappled Pacific light on raw concrete walls, through the feeling that the building knows exactly where it is and has made peace with that completely. In a moment when coastal architecture often defaults to glass maximalism, that kind of grounded confidence is genuinely rare.

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London’s Coolest Capsule Hotel Proves Budget and Beautiful Aren’t Opposites

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London has a new answer to affordable city-centre stays — and it looks nothing like the hostels that came before it. SODA, the London-based architecture studio, has transformed a former backpacker hostel near Oxford Street into Otherwander Soho, a high-density capsule hotel built around 566 sleeping pods the brand calls “nests.” The result is something closer to a boutique hotel than a budget bed, a place that takes the Japanese capsule typology and reframes it for a generation that refuses to choose between cost and quality.

The building itself carries history. Otherwander occupies a pair of early 20th-century structures close to Oxford Street, and SODA’s approach respects that lineage without being precious about it. The facade references the neighbourhood’s material vernacular — hand-laid arched brick details and corbelled window reveals draw from the surrounding Soho streetscape — while the interiors do not attempt to play it safe. Vibrantly coloured social spaces, curved lines, and warm strip lighting push back against the beige neutrality that defines most budget accommodation. A colourful staircase threads the floors together, giving the building a sense of vertical life.

Designer: SODA

SODA director Ryan Holland was clear about the brief from the start. “The aim was to provide affordable, high-density accommodation without compromising the guest experience,” he told Dezeen. The target guest is Gen Z and younger independent travellers — people who are design-literate, location-driven, and unwilling to trade aesthetics for a lower room rate. Each nest is private and soundproofed, with the entire guest journey — check-in, room control, checkout — managed through a phone. It’s a frictionless model designed for people who already live this way.

What SODA gets right here is the balance between compression and comfort. The pods are compact by necessity, but the shared spaces are generous in feeling — designed to do the social heavy lifting that a private nest cannot. It’s a deliberate split: retreat into the pod, expand into the communal. The vibrancy of the common areas makes the smallness of the sleeping space feel intentional rather than compromised.

Capsule hotels have existed at the fringes of Western hospitality for years, mostly as novelty or last resort. Otherwander Soho changes the conversation. Located at 92 Dean Street, it plants itself at the centre of one of London’s most culturally loaded postcodes and dares you to think of it as anything less than a destination. SODA hasn’t just renovated a hostel — they’ve made the case that density and design aren’t opposites.

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Snøhetta’s Sky House Is the Clubhouse That Thinks Like a Playground

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Light does the heavy lifting at Sky House. The fourth and final clubhouse Snøhetta has completed at Hong Kong’s Pavilia Farm development earns its name not through height alone but through intention. At the development’s highest point, a double-height rope-climbing tower rises through the center of the two-story, 12,150-square-foot structure and terminates beneath a domed skylight. The dome pulls the eye — and the light — into a building that was always meant to be about movement, play, and the simple act of looking up.

Pavilia Farm is a 6.5-acre mixed-use development in Hong Kong, and Snøhetta’s strategy across the site has been to distribute what would typically be a single monolithic clubhouse into four distinct structures, each one attuned to a different mode of community life. Well House activates the body. Farm House sits atop a terrace. Tea House projects beyond the site’s edge. Sky House completes the quartet by turning movement into a shared, intergenerational experience. It is a building that makes curiosity social.

Designer: Snøhetta

The spatial logic inside is organized around two contrasting ideas: cave and sky. The lower level, wrapped in an undulating floor whose colors and textures shift the quality of incoming daylight, reads as an enclosed terrain for open-ended play. Snøhetta conceived the lower-level interiors not as a literal grotto but as an environment that does not prescribe specific uses — a quiet and thoughtful move that trusts children to determine the space’s meaning. The rope-climbing tower anchors the room without dominating it, and the open span surrounding the structure gives the whole floor a sense of interior landscape.

Upstairs, the register shifts entirely. Lounge areas, fitness zones, and outdoor exercise spaces occupy the upper level, oriented toward senior residents. The arrangement places children and older residents in proximity, allowing them to see and hear one another. Sky House treats that proximity as a design feature, not an afterthought. The vitality of one group becomes part of the daily texture for the other, and the climbing tower — visible from both levels — becomes a shared focal point rather than a dividing line.

What Snøhetta has built at Pavilia Farm is less a collection of clubhouses than a sustained argument about collective living. Sky House brings that argument to its most expressive point. The dome overhead is structural, yes, but it also functions as a kind of permission: to climb, to wander, to look up, and to do all of it together.

Each of the four buildings at Pavilia Farm speaks to a different rhythm of daily life, and yet Sky House feels like the one that ties the whole vision together. It is the loudest, the most playful, and perhaps the most generous; a building that gives people of different ages and different needs the same roof, the same light, and the same reason to show up.

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Bugatti Residences Miami Is the Most Ambitious Branded Tower to Ever Hit the Miami River

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Bugatti has never done anything quietly — and its first American residential project is no exception. On the Miami River, Brandon Haw Architecture is designing a 60-story tower that carries the weight of one of the most storied names in automotive history, and the pressure to deliver is very much part of the brief.

Bugatti Residences Miami is the French marque’s first foray into the American residential market, following the announcement of its Dubai skyscraper in 2023. The site sits at 75 SW Miami Avenue Road in Brickell, commanding over 300 feet of Miami River frontage with sight lines toward Biscayne Bay. Developed by Prosper Group and Belgium’s Versluys Group, the $650 million tower will house 183 residences and four signature penthouses — a deliberately limited collection that keeps the exclusivity intact.

Designer: Brandon Haw Architecture

What Brandon Haw Architecture has pulled off visually is genuinely interesting. The tower is split into four distinct blocks with double-height spaces punctuating the vertical stack — a move that breaks the monotony of the typical glass curtain-wall high-rise and gives the building a sculptural, segmented rhythm that reads as kinetic from the street. The formal language draws from Bugatti’s C-line motif, a design element that has appeared on the brand’s cars since the 1930s, reinterpreted here in the building’s profile and detailing rather than applied as decorative branding.

Inside, Yabu Pushelberg handles the interiors — a pairing that makes immediate sense. The Toronto and New York-based studio brings a sensibility that is simultaneously refined and spatially generous, qualities that align with what Bugatti’s residential arm is chasing. According to Bugatti International managing director Wiebke Ståhl, the vision extends well beyond aesthetics: “every aspect, from exquisite design to seamless service and operations” is considered part of the experience. Rhodium has been named the residential operating partner, reinforcing that the project is being built as much around lifestyle delivery as an architectural statement.

What makes this project worth watching isn’t the brand name — it’s the combination of players. Brandon Haw Architecture has shown a consistent ability to work at the intersection of high design and urban context, and Miami’s river corridor is one of the few remaining sites in the city with genuine spatial drama. The Brickell location gives residents immediate access to one of Miami’s most active neighborhoods, but the river sets a different tempo — quieter, more considered, more architectural.

The residential offering is expected to launch in 2027. Between now and then, the anticipation alone will do exactly what Bugatti has always understood: make people wait for something worth waiting for.

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A Folding Tiny Home That Refuses to Feel Like Camping

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Camping has always come with a quiet trade-off. You get the freedom of being anywhere, but you give up the comfort of being somewhere. Tents leak, campers feel cramped, and cabins can’t move with you when the season changes. Atelier Lune, a US-based design studio, just built something that refuses to make you choose.

It’s called Camping House. The idea is simple to say and genuinely hard to execute: a home that tows behind a standard SUV, unfolds like a tent within a couple of hours, and then behaves like real architecture once it’s standing. Architect Na Shen, who previously worked at Gensler and Zaha Hadid Architects before starting her own studio, designed the whole structure around that tension between mobility and permanence, and you can feel that intention in every decision she made.

Designer: Atelier Lune

That last part is the actual innovation. Plenty of tiny homes are mobile, but most of them stay rigid once you get them there, basically a smaller box on wheels. Camping House does something different. The structure is a folding shell that fans open on-site into a steep A-frame, then locks into place with weather-sealed joints and insulated panels built to hold up through an actual winter. The A-frame isn’t just an aesthetic choice either. It’s structurally efficient, sheds rain and snow naturally, and creates a dramatic interior volume that reads much larger than the footprint suggests.

The system is built around three modules the studio calls Ports. The Residential Port handles living and sleeping, with furniture that flips from day mode to night mode in seconds. The Utility Port carries a real kitchen and a real bathroom, not a camper-van compromise version of either. The Extended Port clips on when you need a workspace, storage, or room for guests. You arrive, stabilize the base, release the hinges, and the shell swings open into a two-level interior that looks nothing like what fit on the trailer an hour earlier. The joinery and panel system that makes this possible is where most of the real design work lives, hidden in the hinges and seals rather than announced by the exterior.

What makes this feel like it’s arriving at the right moment is who it’s actually for. Remote work untethered a lot of people from a single address, and the appetite for spending real time outdoors, not just weekend camping but seasonal living, has grown alongside it. Camping House is designed with that shift in mind: off-grid solar integration, rainwater harvesting, passive cross-ventilation through a solar chimney, and no permanent foundation required. It leaves the ground beneath it essentially undisturbed, which matters if you’re setting up somewhere ecologically sensitive, or if you just don’t want to explain a poured foundation to a national forest.

There’s a practical honesty to designing for departure instead of designing for permanence. Most residential architecture asks how a building holds its ground. Camping House asks how a building lets go of it. Multiple units can even couple together into small clusters, which opens the door to uses beyond personal travel: disaster relief housing, temporary shelter during regional housing shortages, or small eco-tourism outposts that can be struck at the end of a season without leaving scars.

None of this is on the market yet. It’s a concept, and concepts have a habit of staying concepts. But two people can reportedly assemble it in under two hours, which is a modest ask for what you get in return: a structure with actual dignity, not a glorified pop-up tent with delusions of permanence.

The bigger idea Camping House is testing is whether shelter has to pick a lane between temporary and permanent. For a long time, those felt like separate categories with separate architecture. This project treats them as two settings on the same machine. Whether or not this exact version reaches driveways, the question it’s asking, why should mobility mean sacrificing comfort, feels like one more designers are going to keep chasing.

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