Tag Archives: house

How a 4,200 sq ft Home Finally Solved Multigenerational Living

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Multigenerational living has become one of those design phrases that gets thrown around a lot lately, usually attached to a floor plan that just tacks an extra bedroom onto an existing house and calls it a day. The real challenge isn’t fitting more people under one roof. It’s building a home where an aging parent, a sibling, or a grown child can live fully independent lives while still feeling like they belong to the same household. Most builders solve this with a wall and a separate entrance. A Minnesota architecture firm just solved it with light, geometry, and a piano room.

The house is called Crescendo, designed by CityDeskStudio’s Ben Awes on a narrow creekside lot in the Twin Cities. The story behind it is the kind that makes you rethink what a “forever home” is actually for. A woman had the chance to move back onto the land where she grew up with her three sisters, but she didn’t want the old 1950s house that sat there. She wanted the land itself, the creek, the trees, the memory of the place, rebuilt into something that could hold her present life. That’s a very different starting point than most home renovations, and it shows in how personal the final design feels.

Designer: CityDeskStudio

The couple needed a single-level home they could age into, a separate apartment for the wife’s sister, a home office, and an art studio, which is already a lot to ask of 4,200 square feet. What makes Crescendo work is a shared front entry that splits into two half-flights of stairs, one for the sister’s mudroom and one for the couple’s living space, meeting in the middle but never crossing into each other’s territory. It’s a quietly clever piece of choreography. Nobody has to knock. Nobody has to explain their comings and goings. The privacy is built into the bones of the house rather than negotiated after move-in.

Then there’s the husband’s request, which I have to admit is my favorite detail in the whole project. He’s an architecture fan who loves Louis Kahn, and early on he told Awes that all great architecture has “lift.” So the rooflines rise in sequence across the plan, each section a little higher than the last, which is exactly why the house is named Crescendo. It’s a strange, almost musical way to think about a floor plan, but it works. The house reads as modest from the street, low and unassuming, and then opens up as you move through it. That contrast between restraint and ambition feels honest in a way a lot of statement architecture doesn’t.

The windows carry most of the emotional weight here. Awes worked with Marvin for months on custom, slightly trapezoidal clerestory windows that run higher on the creek side and taper toward the street, and the collaboration involved full-size plywood templates before the bespoke units were ever built. Awes describes the finished house as a literal sundial, saying the windows “locate you in time and space every day” and that the curved plaster ceilings bounce the landscape’s colors back into the interior. That’s a genuinely lovely idea for a house meant to hold three generations of the same family. The light itself becomes a kind of shared calendar, marking the day the same way for everyone living there, separately but together.

Even the small choices reflect this same instinct. An heirloom grand piano gets its own room lit by a high clerestory instead of being pushed into a corner, because Awes felt it deserved to be treated as something worth honoring rather than accommodating. That’s the difference between a house that’s merely functional and one that actually understands what a family needs from a space. Crescendo doesn’t solve multigenerational living by cramming more rooms into a footprint. It solves it by giving everyone their own light, their own stairs, and their own sense of arrival, while still letting the whole place breathe as one home.

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Korean Hanok Design Just Landed in a Moscow Apartment

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Architecture has always been one of the most honest forms of cultural expression. It tells you what a people value, how they move through space, and what kind of relationship they want with the world outside their walls. So when a Korean couple settled in Moscow and commissioned designer Inga Kordya to create their home, the brief was never simply about aesthetics. It was about belonging. The result is Residence Open, and it’s the kind of project that quietly reframes what we mean when we talk about culturally informed design.

Kordya’s starting point was the Korean hanok, the traditional dwelling that has defined Korean domestic architecture for centuries. The hanok isn’t a rigid style so much as a philosophy: rooms that flow into one another, spaces defined by natural light rather than solid walls, a constant conversation between interior and exterior. These are principles that could easily be flattened into trend-driven styling. Inga Kordya did something far more considered than that.

Designer: Inga Kordya (photos by Mikhail Loskutov)

The apartment is organized around filtered light. It moves through the space the way it might move through the latticed wooden screens of a hanok in Seoul, diffused and soft, never harsh. A set of custom oak shutter doors in the living room does much of this work, drawing directly from traditional Korean door design and becoming, in the process, one of the most quietly beautiful features of the entire apartment. They don’t shout for attention. They earn it.

The material palette follows the same logic. Marble, granite, natural wood, brass, ceramics, linen. Nothing synthetic, nothing that flattens texture or pretends to be something it isn’t. These materials read as both internationally sophisticated and grounded in something older and more specific. They’re the kind of choices that age well, which matters enormously in a family home built for the long term.

Speaking of family, the spatial planning for the two daughters is worth pausing on. Their rooms are separated by sliding partitions that open into a shared play area, an idea borrowed directly from the hanok’s flexible interior logic. Spaces in a hanok weren’t locked into single functions. A room could be a sleeping space by night and a social one by day. Kordya applies this thinking to the children’s zone with genuine intelligence, giving the girls independence and togetherness at the same time. That’s not just good design theory. That’s good parenting, built into the walls.

The broader conversation this apartment opens up is one that design has been circling for years: how do you honour cultural heritage without turning it into decoration? Plenty of projects get this wrong. They borrow the visual language of another culture, strip it of meaning, and call it a mood. Kordya avoids this entirely by working from the inside out, from principles and values rather than surfaces. The hanok’s spatial logic, its relationship to light, its flexibility and restraint, these things translate because they were never just visual to begin with.

Context matters more than design writing usually admits. Moscow is not Seoul. The climate is different, the architectural tradition is different, the cultural references a visitor would bring to the space are different. And yet, within the apartment, you feel transported. Not in a theatrical way, not in a way that announces itself. It’s a quieter sensation, more like a shift in atmosphere. The light changes, the materials soften, and the rhythm of moving through the rooms feels deliberate and calm. That quality of calm is the hanok’s deepest gift, and Kordya has managed to carry it across an extraordinary distance.

Residence Open is a reminder that the most interesting design conversations happen at the intersection of cultures rather than within any single one. It takes confidence to root a home this deeply in a tradition that isn’t local, and clarity to translate that tradition faithfully rather than decoratively. Inga Kordya brought both. The result is a home that knows exactly where it comes from, and is completely at ease with where it ended up.

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Why This 1,050 Sq Ft Upside-Down Cottage Beats a McMansion

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A thousand and fifty square feet. That’s roughly the size of a generous one-bedroom apartment in most major cities. And yet somehow, the Skybox, a new residence perched on stilts in Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, manages to feel like a manifesto about how we’ve been thinking about small homes all wrong.

Designed by Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the Skybox was built for a couple called the Everetts, who wanted something honest, modest, and rooted in place. What they got is all of that, and then some. The house sits on a sloping site that runs from road to creek, which is the kind of terrain that usually sends budgets spiraling. Architect Brian MacKay-Lyons solved it elegantly with stilts, lifting the structure off the ground so that it, as he puts it, “floats.” He compares it to a birdhouse. The analogy sticks.

Designer: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects

The Skybox takes its visual cues from the traditional Nova Scotia fisherman’s cottage, but it’s not a nostalgic recreation. The exterior is wrapped in galvalume, an industrial aluminum-zinc alloy that’s durable, low-maintenance, and unapologetically contemporary. The result is a building that reads as both entirely of its place and entirely of its moment. It belongs to the landscape the way a weathered boathouse does, not because it’s pretending to be old, but because it respects the same logic: build lean, build honest, build for the conditions.

The interior takes the most interesting turn. The Skybox is what MacKay-Lyons calls an “upside-down house.” The sleeping areas, the private and quieter spaces of home life, sit on the lower floor. The living room, dining area, and kitchen are upstairs, where the views are wide and the light is generous. It’s a reversal that feels obvious in hindsight, which is usually the mark of a genuinely good idea. Why hide your best rooms at eye level when you could push them toward the sky?

Client Corey Everett coined the phrase “fish shack fabulous” to describe what they were going for, and it’s one of the most useful design descriptors I’ve come across in a while. It captures exactly what’s happening here: humble materials, unpretentious form, but a kind of elevated confidence in the result. No apologies for the size. No compensating with expensive finishes or overworked details. Just a clear idea, executed well.

What makes the Skybox part of a bigger story is the community it belongs to. Upper Kingsburg isn’t a random stretch of Nova Scotia coastline. MacKay-Lyons has spent four decades building dwellings here, more than fifty of them, as part of an ongoing exploration he calls “village-making.” The Skybox is the newest addition to that experiment. His own daughter’s house is visible from the property. This is architecture as long-term commitment, which is rare, and worth noting.

I keep thinking about the cultural timing of this. We are, at this point, thoroughly oversaturated with the idea of the dream home as something maximalist: the open floor plan that swallows a football field, the kitchen with two islands, the great room with thirty-foot ceilings. Those homes photograph well, but they also carry a quiet anxiety, a sense that more space must mean more living. The Skybox argues the opposite. At 1,050 square feet, it’s not asking you to scale down your ambitions. It’s asking you to redirect them.

Small doesn’t have to mean compromise. It can mean precision. It can mean that every decision about where you put a window or how you orient a room is made with intent. The Skybox earns its square footage in a way that many larger homes simply don’t bother to.

MacKay-Lyons described it as floating in the air like a birdhouse, and that’s also a quietly poetic way of explaining why the Skybox works. It’s light. It doesn’t take more than it needs from the land. And it leaves room for the view, the community, and the life happening all around it. That’s a harder thing to design than it looks.

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Inside the 140sqm Danish House With No Hallways, Just Sky

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The moment you see a photograph of the House in Ebeltoft, you notice the roof first. It sweeps wide over the structure like a sheltering arm, its deep overhangs extending far past where conventional logic might permit. Underneath it, a timber-paneled house sits low against the Danish landscape as if it grew there on purpose. Designed by Høyer Arkitektur in collaboration with interior designer Maria-Therese Grant, this 140-square-meter family home manages to feel both elemental and quietly radical at once.

Ebeltoft is a small town on a moraine peninsula in eastern Jutland, the terrain formed during the last Ice Age by glacial activity that carved meltwater valleys and left behind rolling hills, Scots pine scrub, and sandy ridges. The architects chose not to soften this setting. The house sits on one of those elevated plateaus, fully exposed to sky and wind, as though it arrived at a kind of acceptance about exactly where it was placed.

Designer: Hoyer Arkitektur

That relationship with the landscape is not incidental. The large roof overhang is designed to counterbalance the forces of the surrounding terrain, creating a structural tension between the house and its environment. The architecture doesn’t compete with the moraine; it answers it.

Inside, the plan abandons corridors and hallways entirely. Twelve individual rooms, each measuring 3.6 by 3.6 meters, are arranged within a column-and-beam timber structure around a central atrium made of gravel and glass. The atrium opens to all four compass directions simultaneously. River stones cover the floor. A bare-branched tree stands at the center. It reads less like a design feature and more like a courtyard pulled from a much older architectural tradition. The light pulls through from every angle.

The modular system is where the house gets genuinely compelling as a concept. Because the roof is supported entirely by the outer walls, none of the interior partitions carry any structural load. Any wall can be removed and rebuilt as the family’s circumstances shift over time. A child grows up, a home office becomes unnecessary, life rearranges itself. The house accommodates all of it without requiring a renovation in the conventional sense.

Residential architecture rarely trusts a family to know what they will need over the course of a decade. Most homes are built around a fixed idea of how people live, and when that idea changes, the house doesn’t. Høyer Arkitektur took a different position: they built a container for a life, not just a moment in it. That is a genuinely generous design decision, and one that takes more confidence than building something visually spectacular.

The material palette is equally considered. Unfinished spruce CLT covers both the exterior cladding and the interior walls, pale and honest, with no pretense of finish or permanence. Kitchen cabinetry is pale pine. The structure remains visible throughout, including in the covered exterior zone where the column-and-beam rhythm continues past the enclosed rooms. Nothing is concealed that doesn’t need to be.

Høyer Arkitektur describes their practice as gentle architectural construction combined with atmospheric spatial thinking. The description is fair, but it undersells the ambition here. A house that asks you to reconsider how flexibility and permanence might coexist in the same structure is not simply gentle. It is patient. And patience in architecture is far rarer than drama.

The House in Ebeltoft will not enter the same conversation as a landmark cultural building or a starchitect’s latest provocation. It doesn’t need to. It is 140 square meters on a Danish hillside, built of timber, centered on gravel and sky, asking very quiet questions about what a home is actually for. Those questions tend to stay with you longer than the loud ones.

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The Hanoi House With 100 Windows and No Two the Same

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The name alone stops you. 100 Windows. Not “The Pavilion House” or “House No. 7” or something equally poetic and vague. Just a count. A blunt, almost confrontational declaration of exactly what you’re getting, and yet somehow, the moment you see it, the name feels like the most understated thing about it.

Designed by Hanoi-based architecture practice Inrestudio, this multi-generational home is wrapped in a terracotta-toned, double-layered exterior punctured by irregularly placed, mismatched openings. The windows aren’t uniform. They don’t line up in neat rows or follow a rational grid. They appear across the facade like a scatter of thoughts, some large, some small, some square, some elongated, placed with an intention that reveals itself slowly the longer you look. It’s controlled disorder, the kind that only happens when someone has thought very carefully about where chaos is allowed to go.

Designer: Inrestudio

The project sits within one of Vietnam’s most distinctive and genuinely challenging housing typologies: the tube house. These long, narrow urban homes are a product of Hanoi’s history, born from a time when property taxes were levied on street frontage, pushing families to build deep and vertical rather than wide. The tube house is, by nature, a compromise. You work with what the city gives you. What Inrestudio does here is refuse to let that constraint become a ceiling.

The double-layered envelope is the key move. By wrapping the home in two skins instead of one, the architects create what they call “in-between spaces,” zones that exist between the inner living areas and the outer facade. These aren’t wasted margins or dead air. They’re transitional, purposeful areas where the house breathes, where light filters and shifts through the day, where the rigid boundary between inside and outside softens into something more generous. It’s the kind of spatial thinking that doesn’t photograph easily but completely transforms the experience of actually being in a building.

This matters especially because 100 Windows was designed for multiple generations living under one roof, a reality that remains far more common in Vietnam than it does in most Western countries. Designing for multi-generational life is genuinely hard. You’re negotiating different rhythms, different needs for privacy and togetherness, different relationships to noise, light, and air. Architecture that understands this doesn’t just divide a floor plan into labeled rooms. It creates conditions where people can be near each other without being on top of each other, where the house itself does some of the social negotiating.

The terracotta tones feel right for this, too. The palette connects the building to its climate, to the warmth and humidity of Hanoi, to the earth tones of traditional Vietnamese buildings without becoming a costume or a nostalgia piece. It reads as contemporary without trying to distance itself from its own context, which is a balance a lot of architecture gets wrong in either direction.

What you take away from 100 Windows isn’t really about the windows, or at least not literally. It’s about the idea that a constraint, whether it’s a narrow plot, a shared family life, or a hundred openings that need to somehow feel cohesive, can become the source of design rather than the obstacle to it. The windows are a by-product of a layered system, not a stylistic decision made in isolation. That’s what earns it attention beyond the aesthetic.

Architecture like this tends to get filed under “interesting regional work” and not looked at as broadly as it deserves. But the conversation 100 Windows is having about density, family, and what a facade actually owes its inhabitants is one that any city grappling with urban housing should be paying attention to. It’s not proposing a universal solution. It’s doing something more useful: showing what happens when designers take the specific conditions of a place seriously enough to build something genuinely shaped by them. The result is a house that looks singular because it is.

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A Polish Architect Rotated His House to Hide It in the Hill

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Most house designs start with a shape and then find a place for it. What KWK Promes did with the Yaw House, completed in 2025 and nestled in Poland’s Beskid Mountains, is almost the reverse. They let the land tell the building what to do, and the building listened.

The project began conventionally enough. The original concept was a classic gabled form, set parallel to neighboring structures, the kind of thing that blends politely into a mountain village. Respectable. Contextual. Probably a little forgettable. But the terrain wasn’t playing along. The plot has a pronounced slope, and rather than flattening it or working around it, architect Robert Konieczny rotated the entire structure. He literally yawed it, which is where the name comes from: yaw, the aeronautical term for rotation along a vertical axis. The gabled roof pivoted, the building reoriented toward sun and valley views, and something altogether different emerged.

Designer: KWK Promes

The result is a C-shaped house that embeds itself into the hillside rather than sitting on top of it. One corner barely makes contact with the ground. The rest of the structure hovers, tucks, leans in, to the point where the roofline peels away from the hill and dissolves into the surrounding lawn. Grass grows over it. The house doesn’t end where the mountain begins; they merge. From certain angles, you might not even register it as a building at first. That reads as a loss for anyone who wants their home to make a statement, but a quiet kind of brilliance if you’re more interested in belonging to a place than dominating it.

Interiors follow the geometry of the rotation, which gives the spaces a curved, almost circular quality that feels unusual for a residential home. On the ground floor, the orientation prioritizes what actually matters: greenery, natural sunlight, and wide views of the valley below. Private areas sit elsewhere in the plan, separated naturally by the structure’s layering into the slope. It doesn’t feel like a floor plan that was drawn and then decorated; it feels like one that was discovered.

The material choices reinforce all of this. Pine wood runs throughout, with plywood panels used for both the facade and interior walls. It’s warm, honest, and completely in line with the mountain setting. No marble-and-steel contrast trying to signal luxury, no jarring material moments designed to photograph well for social media. The palette is consistent because the thinking behind it is consistent.

I’ve been some residential architecture lately that feels performative, houses where the drama is the point and the living comes second. Yaw House is a useful counterargument. It makes bold moves, and rotating an entire structure to negotiate a difficult slope is not a timid decision, but it does so entirely in service of something real. The circular interior spaces aren’t there to be interesting in a magazine spread; they exist because the geometry demanded them. The green roof isn’t a lifestyle statement; it’s the terrain reclaiming its surface.

KWK Promes has a track record of this kind of thinking. Robert Konieczny’s firm has long been drawn to the challenge of how a building should respond to its specific conditions rather than impose a predetermined vision onto them. The Yaw House feels like a mature expression of that philosophy, one that is both technically ambitious and architecturally generous.

What stays with me, after reading more about this project, is how much restraint it takes to make something that disappears. Our instinct with ambitious architecture is to look for the spectacle. And yes, the Yaw House is spectacular if you know where to look. But it earns that quality quietly, through proportion, orientation, and a refusal to treat the landscape as a backdrop. The mountain isn’t framed in a window here. It’s invited in through the floor plan. That might be the most interesting thing a house can do.

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A Czech Pigsty, Raw Concrete, and 32 Square Meters of Restraint

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Most summer houses get built by tearing something old down and putting something new up. Lenka Milerová did the opposite. She found a crumbling pigsty in Panoší Újezd, a small village in the Czech Republic, and asked what it could become rather than what it should be replaced with. The answer turned out to be one of the most quietly compelling small buildings I’ve come across this year.

The backstory matters here. The client, referred to as Mrs. F., had inherited a property she found too large. Rather than sell or renovate the whole thing, she pared it back to just the old pigsty and a small garden patch. It’s the kind of decision that sounds impractical until you see the result. On paper, it reads as radical downsizing. In person, it apparently reads as near-total reconstruction, carried out brick by brick, mason by mason, over a project that kept growing beyond its original brief.

Designer: Lenka Milerová Architektka

What came out of that process is a 32-square-meter summer house (22 square meters of usable space) that holds a single main room. The existing stone walls stayed. They received a cement spray finish that gives the exterior a rough, almost weathered unity without erasing what was already there. New window openings were cut into the walls, each one framed by monolithic concrete jambs that flow directly into a concrete bench running the full perimeter of the room. That bench does everything: it’s a step, a sofa, a storage unit for firewood, and yes, it also holds a bath. One continuous gesture, one continuous material.

I’ll be honest about my bias here. Raw concrete in small spaces has been done to death, and badly, by enough designers to make me skeptical whenever it shows up. But Milerová earns it. Her statement about the project puts it plainly: “The architectural approach centered on exposing the structural materials and utilizing the most basic construction techniques. Concrete became the medium for detail.” That’s not a vague philosophical statement. You can see exactly what she means in the way the window reveals and the interior bench are cast from the same pour, the same thinking, the same hand.

The windows themselves are steel profiles without a thermal bridge, supplied by Kaltmeyer using Jansen systems. Because this is a summer house, Czech building codes don’t require the same thermal performance standards as a year-round residence. That exemption sounds like a loophole, but here it’s actually design freedom. It means the frames can be honest about what they are. No layered insulation, no concealed systems, no pretense.

The personal dimension of this project is what gives it something extra. Milerová is from the same district as her client, and her father welded the steel brackets that mount the front door. That level of handmade involvement, where the architect’s own family literally built parts of the building, isn’t something you see in most residential projects, let alone ones that end up on Dezeen. It pulls the whole thing closer to craft than to architecture in the institutional sense, which I think is exactly the right register for a building this small and this specific.

The outdoor kitchen sits alongside the entrance, with hanging pots and an open-air sensibility that makes clear this isn’t a house trying to be a house. It’s a summer place. It knows its season and its purpose.

Panoší Újezd Summer House completed in 2024, photographed by Radek Šrettr Úlehla, and it’s been making the rounds online for good reason. At 32 square meters, it proves that scale is the wrong measure of ambition. The better question is whether a building knows what it is and commits to it fully. This one does, without apology and without excess.

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OHLAB Just Built a Home That Runs on Mallorca’s Sun

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A circular hole in a roof shouldn’t carry this much weight. But at Casa Óculo, the new residential project by Palma-based studio OHLAB, that opening does more than let in light. It tells you almost everything you need to know about how the house was designed to work.

Situated in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Palma de Mallorca, the house is organized around a single architectural gesture: a large flat roof that stretches from east to west across the entire site. From that one decision, everything else follows. The roof extends beyond the enclosed volumes, creating deep perimeter porches that sit between inside and outside, allowing the house to breathe with the season rather than fight it. It sounds almost too simple. That simplicity, though, is exactly the point.

Designer: OHLAB

The name comes from the circular opening cut into the roof, the óculo, a feature that tracks the sun’s path through the interior over the course of a day. In winter, the lower solar angle draws light deep into the living spaces, warming the stone floors. In summer, the higher angle keeps direct sunlight mostly on the terrace, reducing heat gain inside. It’s a passive climate strategy dressed up as a design feature, and it’s genuinely rare to see those two things feel this seamlessly aligned. Usually one is doing the work and the other is along for the ride.

The material palette is equally restrained and equally deliberate. Stone flooring, timber joinery, natural brass details, and lime mortar walls compose an interior that feels considered without feeling decorated. The lime mortar is particularly worth noting. It’s breathable and hygroscopic, meaning it actively responds to humidity levels in the air and improves indoor comfort without any mechanical intervention. It also develops a natural patina over time, which is a design choice that still feels quietly radical. Most buildings age badly because the materials resist change. Here, aging is written into the brief as a feature rather than a flaw.

OHLAB, founded by Paloma Hernáiz and Jaime Oliver, consistently returns to the idea that Mediterranean architecture isn’t just a visual language but a climatic one. Casa Óculo reads like a proof of concept for that thinking. The south-facing topography and open mountain views aren’t scenic backdrops; they’re structural to how the house functions day to day. The landscape, designed with native, drought-tolerant planting, extends the character of the surrounding mountains into the site. Seasonal flowering and shifting textures mean the garden evolves alongside the architecture, so the house looks and feels different in April than it does in July. That kind of living relationship between a building and its site is harder to achieve than it looks.

For anyone who follows architecture or design, the project sits in an interesting moment in the broader conversation about how we build. Passive design has been part of that conversation for decades, but it tends to end up as a footnote on the spec sheet rather than the organizing principle of the entire house. Casa Óculo flips that completely. Climate isn’t a constraint to be managed; it’s the primary material being worked with. That shift in thinking matters more than it might seem.

OHLAB described the project as “a small manifesto of contemporary Mediterranean living: efficient, tactile, and deeply connected to its place.” That’s a bold thing to put in your own project notes. But looking at the photographs, it’s difficult to argue with. The spaces feel calm rather than minimal, lived-in before anyone has moved in. The light traces along the lime walls the way it only does when a building has earned it.

You don’t have to be particularly invested in architecture to respond to what Casa Óculo is doing. It speaks to something broader: a preference for things built to last, designed to adapt, and genuinely rooted in where they actually exist rather than wherever they could have been placed. Not a new idea, but one being executed here with a clarity and commitment that still manages to feel rare.

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Tokyo Ballet House by Kenta SANO & Associates Is Where the City Becomes the Audience

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In the Komagome neighborhood of Tokyo’s Johoku district, tucked near Rikugien — one of the two great gardens of old Edo — a new building is quietly rewriting what a ballet studio can be. Completed in September 2024, the Tokyo Ballet House by Kenta SANO & Associates, Architects is a dwelling house combined with a ballet studio, and its most radical gesture is the one you don’t immediately see: the city outside is treated as the audience.

The project sits in a neighborhood that was once dense with plant merchants and samurai residences. That green legacy is fading fast. Mini-developments are eating into what was once one of Tokyo’s largest urban green belts, replacing mature trees with token landscaping planted just to satisfy ordinance requirements. SANO’s response was to design something that holds greenery rather than displaces it — a small act of repayment to a neighborhood the client was born and raised in.

Designer: Kenta Sano & Associates

The building is four stories of steel structure, and its massing reads as two separate volumes stacked with an intentional gap between them. The lower level holds the garage and the studio’s supporting functions — changing rooms, service spaces. The ballet studio itself sits above, its floor detached from the ground and its ceiling set at 4.2 meters, generous enough for the kind of large, airborne leaps that define the art form.

The upper level is a compact residence, penthouse-like in character, with a terrace that wraps the perimeter and connects seamlessly with the interior floor. The sloped roof, boldly cut to navigate Tokyo’s setback regulations, folds into the interior as a sloped ceiling, giving the one-room living space a sculptural quality the floor plan alone can’t convey. The void between the two volumes becomes the building’s lungs — open eaves and a terrace that pull greenery into the heart of the structure. What could have been wasted space becomes the reason the building breathes.

But the real conceptual weight belongs to the studio itself. The ballet school’s owner has always prioritized performance over practice — recitals over rehearsals — and SANO built that philosophy into the architecture. The north-facing glass screen becomes the proscenium. Full-height textiles hang like stage curtains.

The studio floor, kept close to street level by minimizing the garage ceiling height above, reaches toward the city rather than hiding from it. The neighborhood outside the glass is not an intrusion — it’s the audience. A structural engineer visiting from abroad looked out from the interior and called the view unmistakably Tokyo. SANO agreed, and the building’s name followed from that moment.

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The Madrid House Built From 5 Interlocking Cylinders

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The first time I saw photos of the House in Las Rozas, I genuinely thought it was a render. Not because it looked fake, but because it looked too intentional to be real. Five white cylinders, intersecting and overlapping on a gently sloping hillside just outside Madrid, with the Sierra de Guadarrama stretched out behind them like a painting. It’s the kind of house that makes you pause, tilt your head, and wonder exactly what kind of mind looked at an empty plot of land and thought: cylinders.

That mind belongs to Fran Silvestre Arquitectos, a Valencia-based firm that has quietly become one of the most compelling architectural studios working today. Their portfolio already includes some breathtaking residential work, but the House in Las Rozas feels like a step further out on the ledge. It’s a 370-square-meter home built not just around a geometry, but entirely because of one.

Designer: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos

Here’s what makes this project genuinely interesting rather than just visually provocative: the cylinders aren’t decorative. Each one houses a specific function. One holds the bedrooms. Another wraps around the main living area. A third integrates the garage and wellness space. The fourth contains the pool and technical facilities. The fifth marks the entrance. The form follows the function so precisely that you almost feel the logic in your body before you consciously understand it. You just know where you are in the house, because the architecture tells you.

The site itself shaped a lot of the decisions here. The natural slope of the terrain meant that cutting the base of each cylinder at an angle was the most honest solution. Rather than leveling the ground to accommodate the building, the building accommodates the ground. Oblique cuts at the base of each volume let the cylinders sit naturally in the landscape, giving the whole composition a sense of growing from the earth rather than being placed on top of it. That distinction sounds small but it changes everything about how the house feels, and how it reads against those sweeping views toward the mountains.

Light is handled with the same level of intentionality. Skylights and carefully positioned openings track the movement of the sun throughout the day, so the interior is never static. Curved walls catch light differently than flat ones do, and the architects lean into that fully. The effect is a home that shifts its mood depending on the hour, which is the kind of livability that doesn’t photograph well but makes a place genuinely worth living in. At the center of the five cylinders, a compact courtyard acts as the spatial anchor, pulling natural light deep into the house and creating visual connections between each volume and the landscape beyond.

Minimalism is the interior language, and it works. Alfaro Hofmann handled the interiors, keeping the detailing clean enough that the cylindrical walls remain the main event. Each volume also opens onto its own terrace or courtyard, which means privacy is built directly into the plan. You don’t need curtains or clever furniture arrangements to carve out a personal corner. The architecture does that work already.

There’s a broader conversation happening in residential architecture right now about whether formal experimentation can coexist with genuine livability. A lot of striking houses look incredible from the outside and feel exhausting to actually inhabit. The House in Las Rozas seems determined to prove that the two don’t have to be in conflict. The curved walls, the natural light, the sequenced privacy, the connection to the terrain, none of these are trade-offs made for the sake of an interesting photograph. They are outcomes of a coherent idea applied rigorously from concept to completion.

What separates work like this from pure architectural ego is the sense that every unusual decision was made in service of the people who will live there. The cylinders are not a statement for the street. They are an organizing principle for a life. And somehow that makes them feel less radical and more inevitable, which is probably the highest compliment you can give a house.

The post The Madrid House Built From 5 Interlocking Cylinders first appeared on Yanko Design.