Bellavista 11 makes a hillside feel like the starting point of a home rather than a problem to solve. Designed by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos in Roca Llisa, Ibiza, the villa descends toward the Mediterranean through a sequence of white horizontal planes. Its most striking feature is not its size or its pool, but the way its roofs, floors, and terraces appear to belong to one continuous architectural gesture.

The house is the first completed residence in The Roca Views, a development of six homes by the studio. Across three low volumes, the arrangement follows the slope: arrival and garage at the top, shared living spaces in the middle, and five bedrooms below. This descending organization gives the building a legible rhythm, breaking its mass into layers rather than presenting one tall facade to the hillside.

Designer: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos

The defining white concrete plane is just 15 centimeters thick, approximately six inches. Its folds establish roof terraces above the lower volumes and extend outward to shelter outdoor areas. The appeal lies in this double duty: the geometry that gives the villa its identity also helps organize daily life around sun, shade, and time outside.

The central living level brings the kitchen, dining area, and lounge together beside the swimming pool. Full-height sliding glass doors use slender frames and concealed tracks to keep the threshold visually quiet. Open, they connect the rooms to their terraces; closed, they retain the expansive outlook. Below, the bedroom volume faces another outdoor seating area, giving the quieter part of the house its own relationship with the surrounding landscape.

Inside, the material palette softens the precision of the exterior. White walls sit alongside natural stone flooring, oak, and stretched textile ceilings, as detailed by the developer. These surfaces give sunlight different textures to move across, allowing warmth without relying on a busy mix of finishes. In the main bedroom, a private terrace extends the room outward, while motorized curtains offer control over daylight and privacy.

There is a practical counterpoint to all this apparent effortlessness: a house arranged down a slope moves to levels part of everyday living. The developer lists an elevator among the villa’s features, an important detail within such a strongly stepped plan. The project is therefore more interesting as a carefully organized hillside home than as an image of minimalism alone.

Bellavista 11 works best when its sculptural clarity is understood through those ordinary experiences: arriving, descending, opening a door, or finding shade beside the pool. The white planes provide a consistent frame, but the changing Mediterranean light and distant sea supply the variation. Its restraint gives the landscape room to remain the most compelling presence in the house every day.

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The trees came first at Casa Sima, and Dosorozco let them determine where the house could go. Set on a wooded slope in Mexico’s Sierra de Tapalpa, Jalisco, the 150-square-meter home occupies an existing clearing. The studio’s decision to retain every tree shaped its elongated plan, terraces, and points of contact with the ground, according to creative director Guillermo R. Orozco.

That constraint gives the project a convincing starting point. A forest setting can easily become scenery for a building conceived independently of it. Here, the architects describe the positions of individual trees as an organizing framework. The interesting design work lies in accommodating what was already growing, with the building’s geometry responding to the site rather than demanding a cleared patch of its own.

Designer: Dosorozco

A raised, stepped walkway climbs toward the house. At the entrance, a timber wall held within a steel frame creates what Orozco calls an “elevated courtyard.” Open to the forest and suspended above the terrain, this threshold introduces enclosure before visitors reach an interior room. It makes the approach part of the architecture, giving arrival its own space without sealing it off.

The timber receives a local oil-and-heat treatment that produces a rough, blackened surface. Stone and pale plaster complete the material palette. Their appeal here is the range of surfaces they bring to the compact composition: dark wood establishes depth, exposed stone gives the walls a pronounced texture, and plaster provides a quieter counterpoint. The studio intended these finishes to echo the surrounding forest’s tones and textures.

Two intersecting rectilinear volumes organize the house. Downstairs, the living, dining, and kitchen area sits between stone walls beneath dark timber ceilings. Glazing opens toward a ground-level southern terrace and an elevated northern terrace. A study and bathroom share this floor, while two bedrooms upstairs have access to rooftop terraces. The arrangement offers several different relationships with the same sloping landscape.

Orozco described Casa Si. Ma as a home for two people. He also explained the studio’s interest in the progressive revelation of spaces, with light and landscape shaping how a building is encountered. That thinking helps explain why the entrance and terraces deserve as much attention as the enclosed rooms: movement through the house is part of its design.

Casa Sima’s strongest idea is this sequence of changing positions: approaching above the ground, entering through an open threshold, then occupying rooms that connect to terraces at different heights. Read this way, its modest floor area becomes a framework for varied encounters with the site. The forest remains close, but the architecture gives each encounter a distinct setting.

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A curved timber volume sits at the heart of Sugi House, shaping the rooms around it without closing them off. Designed by Ujizono Architects, the family residence occupies an 83.91-square-meter site in Kyoto, beside the southern approach to Yoshida Shrine. Completed in January 2026, the timber-framed house contains 94.87 square meters of floor space, with its most interesting decisions unfolding inside a restrained exterior.

From the street, the upper story reads as a wooden box suspended above a recessed entrance and parking space. Vertical boards give the facade a fine grain, interrupted by a single prominent rectangular window. A raised strip of glazing peeks above the front roofline. The composition sits between neighboring houses without trying to outshout them; its depth comes from the shadow beneath the projecting upper floor.

Designer: Ujizono Architects

Inside, architects Kazuki Ujigawa and Mirai Ozono establish a contrast between levels. The ground floor follows a relatively enclosed arrangement, with a hallway connecting three bedrooms and a bathroom. A staircase toward the rear leads upstairs, where living, cooking, and dining share a more expansive volume beneath the pitched ceiling. The climb makes the shift from private rooms to communal space part of the everyday route through the house.

That upper floor avoids the blank openness of an undivided room. Its curved timber core partially separates the living area from the lower kitchen and dining zone, while concealing a ladder-like stair to a mezzanine. Moving around the curve changes what is visible and what disappears behind it. A lowered ceiling above the kitchen reinforces the distinction, giving different activities their own proportions without enclosing each one behind a door.

Daylight provides another way to open the interior while maintaining distance from neighboring properties. According to the architects’ project description, high-level windows admit light deeper into the house while limiting direct overlooking. Exposed timber rafters remain visible beneath the roof, giving that overhead space a legible structure. The design’s sense of openness relies on height and illumination rather than extensive outward-facing glass.

Elsewhere, openings between floors create visual connections, while curtains offer boundaries that residents can adjust. These elements support the architects’ intention for family members to remain aware of one another while occupying separate spaces. Privacy becomes something that can vary with the activity, rather than a condition determined entirely by fixed walls.

The curved core is the persuasive move here. It gives the shared floor a center, makes circulation purposeful, and offers partial separation without requiring a corridor. For a compact family home, that is a useful middle ground: enough definition to distinguish activities, with room for daily life to overlap.

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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.

The post This Mexican Beach House Swapped Glass Walls for Concrete and Palm — and Won first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most architects build big to be taken seriously. Hafsa Burt builds small for the same reason. Her latest project, the Null House, designed through her San Francisco studio hb+a Architects, arrives as both a prototype and a thought experiment — a deliberate reckoning with what shelter actually needs to be. Burt, a LEED Fellow and AIA architect who has spent decades pioneering low-carbon, health-focused design, isn’t interested in excess. Null is the built proof of that conviction.

The structure is assembled from structural steel, its walls and ceilings wrapped in careful insulation that takes the building’s thermal performance seriously from the inside out. Exterior wood cladding gives it warmth where the material language could easily have felt clinical, while the drywall detailing within keeps the interior honest and spare. Nothing performs for the sake of it. The choices read as disciplined rather than austere — each one pulling its weight without announcement.

Designer: Hafsa Burt

What makes Null compelling beyond its construction is what it represents within Burt’s broader body of work. Through Box Lab, her development initiative focused on scalable zero-energy and low-carbon prototypes, she’s been building the case for this kind of architecture long before it became industry conversation. Null sits inside that lineage. It’s not a one-off statement piece. It’s a template — designed to be understood, replicated, and refined. The smallness of the house is precisely the point: proving that a building this considered doesn’t require scale to succeed.

Burt has spent years speaking about indoor air quality and carbon neutrality at a level most architects arrived at only recently. That expertise runs through Null at a material level. The insulation isn’t a checkbox. The all-electric sensibility — consistent with her studio’s past work — treats operational performance as a design criterion, not an afterthought. The result is a house that lives the argument rather than just making it.

Null won’t appeal to everyone. It asks something of its occupant: a willingness to live with less surface area, less visual noise, less of the gratuitous square footage that inflates so much contemporary residential design. But for those paying attention to where architecture needs to go — toward smaller footprints, cleaner systems, and buildings that perform as well as they look — Null is precisely the kind of project worth watching. Hafsa Burt has always built for the future. This time, she named it.

The post Null Is a House. It’s Also a Challenge to Every Oversized Home Ever Built. first appeared on Yanko Design.

Not every house is built to be seen. The Milo House, designed by Vermont-based studio Elizabeth Herrmann Architecture + Design, is exactly that kind of building. Perched on a hillside in Cornwall, Vermont, the home was conceived for a couple relocating from Boston — and named, warmly, after their dog.

The site set the agenda from day one. Orchards, a dense tree canopy, and long western views stretching toward the Adirondack Mountains shaped every decision Herrmann made. The result is a composition of irregular, offset volumes that feel less like a house imposed on a hillside and more like one that grew there. The forms respond directly to topography, pushing and pulling against the terrain to create what Herrmann describes as moments of “compression and release” that unfold as you move through the home.

Design: Elizabeth Herrmann Architecture + Design

The exterior material choice is where the design gets its clearest statement. Facades are clad in Nakamoto Forestry’s Gendai® yakisugi — Japanese cedar charred using an ancient technique that enhances the wood’s durability, rot resistance, and dimensional stability. The Gendai® variation is brushed once after charring to soften the soot, letting the cedar’s natural grain surface beneath the carbonized skin. Up close, it has depth. From a distance, it reads almost exactly like bark. That’s not coincidental. “We were really interested in having the house feel natural — almost bark-like in tone and texture,” says Herrmann. “We love working with natural materials that have texture, patina, and depth of character.”

The material also carries an implicit philosophy about time. Yakisugi isn’t meant to stay static — it weathers, shifts, and evolves. “The point of yakisugi isn’t for it to stay frozen in time. It’s a living material designed to evolve. The clients really embraced that idea,” Herrmann notes. For a home built around slower living, remote work, and genuine connection to place, that mindset runs all the way through.

Step inside and the dark exterior gives way to cathedral-like rooms, earthy finishes, and an abundance of natural light. Cross-ventilation moves through the offset volumes efficiently, and the siting frames views rather than competes with them. A detached sauna, clad in the same yakisugi siding, anchors the property and completes the picture — a full retreat, not just a house. The Milo House isn’t trying to be a landmark. It’s trying to belong. And it does.

The post This House Disappears Into the Vermont Forest — and That’s Entirely the Point first appeared on Yanko Design.

House 22, designed by Chilean studio Loft7 and completed in 2023, sits on a sloping coastal lot south of Punta de Lobos — a stretch of Chilean coastline known for dramatic surf and untouched native scrubland. The lot descends toward the northwest, and rather than resisting that gradient, the architecture follows it, letting the terrain pull the building naturally toward an uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean.

At 320 square meters, the residence is generous without being excessive. Loft7 structured the build using a combination of reinforced concrete and steel frames — a technical pairing that allows the house to hold its ground on a challenging slope while keeping the interior language warm and tactile. Exposed timber beams run through the living spaces, the dining area, and the kitchen, grounding each room in material honesty. There’s no attempt to disguise how the building is put together. That transparency is the design.

Designer: Loft7

What makes House 22 worth studying isn’t a single dramatic gesture — it’s restraint applied consistently. The interiors lean on wood, natural light, and sightlines that always resolve at the ocean. No surface fights for attention. The beam grid overhead becomes rhythm rather than decoration, and the open-plan social spaces feel like they’re orientated by the view rather than by a floor plan. Spaces breathe because the architecture got out of the way.

Pichilemu is famous in surfing circles, but architecturally it’s a place where the Chilean coast has quietly been producing some of the country’s most considered residential work. Loft7 fits that lineage — a studio that has built its reputation around sites where nature already has the upper hand. Their approach with Casa 22 trusts the land and the light, deploying materials that age well in a coastal climate and a massing that reads modestly from the outside while delivering on every expectation from within.

Photographed by Fabián Acuña, the project looks different at every hour of the day. Morning light hits the timber and fills the interiors with warmth; the Pacific turns silver in the afternoon. That relationship between material, orientation, and time of day is never accidental in good coastal architecture — and here it feels entirely intentional. House 22 isn’t trying to be the loudest house on the Chilean coast. It’s trying to be the most honest one. On both counts, Loft7 delivers.

The post A Chilean Architect Quietly Built a House That Follows the Hill Instead of Fighting It first appeared on Yanko Design.