Tag Archives: houses

This Indonesian House Turns Its Sloping Roof Into a Garden, a Staircase, & a Rooftop Pool

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Some houses are designed to be looked at. Split Mass Residence, completed in 2026 by K-Thengono Design Studio, is designed to be moved through — a 712-square-metre home in BSD, South Tangerang, Indonesia, where every architectural decision is in service of movement, togetherness, and the slow pull of the outdoors.

Founder Kelvin Thengono built the project around a single, quietly radical idea: “The main design goal was to allow a seamless sequence of spaces that keeps the family connected, while also staying closely aligned with the surrounding landscape.” The house sits on a corner — what architects call a hook site condition — and rather than treat that exposure as a problem, the studio used it as the engine for the entire massing strategy. Volumes are split, pulled apart, and repositioned so that no single path through the house feels accidental.

Designer: K-Thengono Design Studio

That split is where the project gets interesting. Tiered, sloping garden roofs connect indoor living spaces directly to the planted outdoor setting, blurring the line between ceiling and garden in a way that feels more organic than architectural. From the open-plan kitchen, living, and dining area on the first floor, a glass door opens straight onto a grassy rooftop slope. An outdoor staircase continues upward to a swimming pool and barbecue area — the roof isn’t just a lid; it’s the social core of the house.

On the exterior, two materials do the heavy lifting. Concrete anchors the structure, giving it weight and presence on the streetscape. PE rattan panels wrap across the facade in woven screens that soften everything — filtering light, adding texture, and offering just enough visual privacy without closing the house off from its surroundings. The contrast is deliberate: one material says permanence, the other says warmth. Together they give the house a character that’s grounded and tactile rather than slick.

What Thengono has built here isn’t really a house in the traditional sense — it’s a system of encounters. Divided volumes, green roofs, and internal and external staircases create different scenarios for family interaction, so the architecture itself nudges people toward each other without ever forcing it. The rooftop garden crowning the whole composition reinforces that layered approach — landscape as architecture, architecture as landscape.

In a region where residential design often defaults to gated grandeur or tight minimalism, Split Mass Residence lands somewhere more considered. It’s a house that knows exactly where it wants you to be — and makes getting there feel like the whole point.

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This House Disappears Into the Vermont Forest — and That’s Entirely the Point

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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.

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This House Splits Into Three Pieces So It Can Stay Hidden in Its Own Forest

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The Curious House in Zagreb doesn’t try to win you over immediately, and that’s exactly the point. Designed by Croatian studio FORVM arhitektura, it’s a family residence perched on a steep hillside, slightly pulled back from the main road and swallowed by dense urban vegetation — orchards, spruces, pines, cedars. The house doesn’t announce itself. It settles in.

Rather than drop a single mass onto the slope, FORVM broke the program into three distinct elements, each responding to a different register of the site. It’s a compositional decision that reads as both pragmatic and poetic, dissolving the usual tension between building and terrain into something more like a conversation. The topography shapes the architecture. The architecture shapes how you live inside it.

Designer: FORVM

The ground floor is fully glazed — a deliberate move to keep the resident in constant dialogue with the world outside. Green cascades past the glass. The tree canopies filter sunlight and block sightlines, doing the work that walls might otherwise do. Privacy here isn’t enforced by opacity; it’s offered by nature. The forest earns its place as an active participant in the spatial experience, not just a backdrop.

The upper floor shifts register. Where the ground level opens up, the upper volume turns more inward, more considered. Roof windows cut directly to the sky, and through them, tree silhouettes remind you again that you’re inside a forest. The building keeps finding ways to return you to the landscape — not through grand gestures, but through quiet architectural moves that accumulate into something genuinely atmospheric.

From the outside, the Curious House plays a different game. Its smooth, reflective surfaces don’t reveal the interior so much as they absorb the green world around it. You expect transparency; instead, you get a mirror. The observer looks for signs of life within the envelope and finds it harder than the glazing might suggest. It’s a house that hides in plain sight.

Designed by Dinko Uglešić, Ina Vlahović, and Marijana Rančić, and photographed by Bosnic+Dorotic, the Curious House exemplifies a strain of European residential architecture that takes landscape seriously — not as an amenity to be framed, but as a logic to be followed. FORVM, founded in 1991 by Ante Uglešić, has long worked within the specifics of Croatian terrain and climate, and that attentiveness shows here in every decision, from the fragmented massing to the calibrated relationship between glass and canopy.

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A Chilean Architect Quietly Built a House That Follows the Hill Instead of Fighting It

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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.

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36 Apartments, Six Clusters, One Printer: Denmark Just Built Europe’s Largest 3D-Printed Village

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There’s a moment when a technology stops being a proof of concept and starts being someone’s home. That moment arrived in Holstebro, Denmark, with the completion of Skovsporet — 36 student apartments built almost entirely by a robotic printer, making it one of the largest 3D-printed housing projects in the world.

The project was commissioned by NordVestBO and delivered by 3DCP Group, with architecture from SAGA Space Architects and MS+. It sits close to VIA University College, which makes the location feel intentional rather than incidental — a student village that grew from the ground up, literally. The name Skovsporet translates loosely to “forest track,” and the design leans into that softness. Six low-rise clusters, each holding six apartments, wrap around shared courtyards and landscaped gardens. Walking paths and bicycle parking thread through the site, creating the kind of everyday rhythm that makes a place feel lived-in rather than installed.

Designer: 3DCP Group, SAGA Space Architects & MS+

At 1,650 square meters across 36 units ranging from 39 to 50 square meters, the scale is modest by development standards. But that restraint is the point. Each apartment is self-contained — full kitchen, study area, sofa lounge, bathroom with shower, and a proper double bed. It’s everything a student actually needs, without excess. The architecture doesn’t perform ambition; it delivers it quietly.

The structural walls were printed on-site using a COBOD BOD3 printer operated by a three-person team, achieving millimeter-level accuracy across the entire build. The concrete mix, D.fab, contains FUTURECEM — a lower-carbon cement developed by Aalborg Portland — reducing the environmental footprint without compromising structural integrity. The bicycle shed pushed things further, using 3D-printed elements containing zero cement, achieving an 84% reduction in CO₂ emissions compared to traditional concrete. That’s not a marketing footnote. That’s a material shift.

“We have gone from printing small prototypes to creating 36 real homes and an entire community. That is the scale where technology starts to matter as a serious tool for architecture,” – Sebastian Aristotelis, Co-Founder and Lead Architect of SAGA Space Architects, said it plainly. The technical breakthrough wasn’t a single successful print. It was repeating that success 36 times over 12 months without losing control of the outcome.

Construction is now complete, with students set to move in. 3DCP Group and SAGA are already researching new material configurations for future projects, treating Skovsporet not as a destination but as a baseline. That’s the right instinct. When a neighborhood built by robots starts to feel normal, you know the technology has finally grown up.

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This House Makes You Sweat, Then Harvests That Energy to Power Itself

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Most houses ask you to sit still. The Staircase House asks you to climb. This small, unbuilt concept wraps 180 wooden steps around a simple 1,000 sq ft cube, turning the entire building envelope into a piece of exercise equipment that also happens to keep the lights on. It’s a house shaped by staircases and about them.

Every one of those steps hides a piezoelectric tread plate underneath the surface, converting the weight of a footstep into a small charge of electricity. That energy gets stored in onsite batteries and folded back into the house’s power supply, a modest amount per step, but multiplied across 180 treads and however many trips residents make up and down them. The building quietly rewards the exact behavior it was designed to encourage.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Climb high enough, and the stairs deliver you to an open rooftop deck built with benches and storage cabinets tucked into the framing. Four wooden decks wrap the ground floor as well, so the house offers outdoor space at both its base and its summit, connected by the staircases running up its exterior walls. You could start a morning on the roof and end an evening on the ground, using the same climbing structure to bridge both.

Down at ground level, four oversized sliding glass doors mark the entry points at two corners, letting the interior breathe and stay naturally ventilated without mechanical assistance. Inside, a large central skylight repeats that same logic overhead, pulling daylight down through a stepped shaft that echoes the stair motif one more time before it reaches the floor.

Practical rooms get folded into the leftover space beneath the exterior staircases rather than competing with them. An office, food preparation area, storage, and entertainment space are all built into the walls under those stair volumes, while a compact bathroom module stands apart in one corner with a guest bed positioned on top of it. Nothing about the layout wastes the odd geometry the stairs create.

Even the furniture inside carries the theme forward. Every piece was shaped to visually reference climbing in some way: benches that step down like miniature staircases, tables whose legs echo the same stacked rhythm found on the exterior. It’s a small detail, but it keeps the concept from feeling like a gimmick bolted onto an otherwise ordinary house.

Built entirely from sustainably grown, painted or stained wood, the structure treats sustainability as something achieved through use as much as through materials. A retreat, studio, office, or guesthouse could all fit comfortably inside this footprint, and the house doesn’t really distinguish between those uses and the act of physically moving through it. The whole structure works like a machine built to be lived in and worked out on at the same time.

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A Designer Just Freed Wood From Every Straight Line in This Home

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The Curved Wood House concept reimagines what a home can look like when wood is freed from rigid, rectilinear frameworks. Designed for a high desert setting, this unbuilt vision uses sustainably grown engineered lumber to create a structure made entirely of interwoven curves that sweep across walls and arc overhead. It’s the kind of design that makes you question why anyone ever settled for boxes.

The high desert is a demanding place to build. Temperatures swing wildly between day and night, the sun is relentless, and shade is a genuine luxury. That context shapes every decision here. Large canopied areas wrap around the two-level interior, sheltered by sweeping curved forms that give the structure its dramatic silhouette. You’d end up spending as much time under those canopies as you would inside.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The key to all of it is engineered lumber, a material that can be laminated and bent into curves that solid timber simply can’t achieve. Every component, from the stacked planks that form the walls to the grand arching ribs overhead, shares the same warm, golden-yellow finish. The interlocking curves give the whole thing the impression of something that grew from the ground up.

Sustainability runs deeper than just the choice of material. A bank of curved solar panels integrates directly into one of the south-facing arches, turning a structural element into the home’s power source. Desert trees and native vegetation weave through the composition as well, softening the boundary between built structure and landscape. The whole concept treats its site as a partner rather than a blank slate.

Those curved canopies do something practical beyond just looking extraordinary. They create generous shaded passages and outdoor gathering areas between the desert floor and the open sky, the kind of in-between spaces that most residential architecture doesn’t think to provide. Imagine eating breakfast or settling in for an evening out there, with desert trees growing in close and the whole structure arching above you.

The wooden construction also does something subtle with light. Gaps between the laminated planks and the open latticework of the curved forms mean sunlight doesn’t just enter from above but filters through the walls themselves, casting shifting patterns across the ground throughout the day. It’s the kind of atmospheric quality that sealed glass or solid concrete walls simply can’t replicate, no matter how clever their arrangement.

Cross the threshold and everything changes. The interior is deliberately minimal, with smooth white walls, white ceilings, and pale gray floors that let natural light do the work. After so much visual intensity outside, that restraint feels welcome. It’s a calm, clutter-free space designed for actual living, a place where you can think, sleep, and settle without the architecture competing for your attention.

What makes this concept worth taking seriously, even as an unbuilt proposal, is how much it asks of a single material. Engineered lumber has long been treated as a practical workhorse, a stand-in for steel or concrete rather than a medium for genuine architectural ambition. This concept argues otherwise, and it makes a surprisingly solid case that wood, given enough intention, can do just about anything.

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This 1970s Japanese Home Tore Out Every Wall and Came Back Better Than Ever

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Renovation is harder than building from scratch. You inherit someone else’s decisions — structural, spatial, aesthetic — and you’re asked to make them feel new without erasing what made them worth saving. Studio HYAN understood that with the Green Sandwich House, a 1970s home in Hayama, south of Tokyo, renovated for the studio’s own founders: architect Anna Naganuma and designer Shohei Hasegawa.

The starting point, as Hasegawa puts it, was inheritance rather than demolition. “Preserving a 1970s house wasn’t the goal in itself; we wanted to read the potential of the existing frame and update it for how we live today.” That clarity of intent matters. A lot of renovations get lost between nostalgia and novelty. This one knew exactly what it was doing.

Designer: Studio HYAN

The home required significant structural reinforcement to meet modern seismic codes — a constraint HYAN turned into an opportunity. Rather than hiding the work, they built around it. The retained timber columns and roof beams are left exposed throughout, quietly tracing where the old partition walls once stood. The structure becomes the architecture. Almost every internal partition on the ground floor was removed, replaced by a single, flowing living, dining, and kitchen space where zoning is handled through changes in floor level and ceiling height rather than walls.

The living area occupies a double-height volume beside the kitchen and dining zone, while the floor steps down slightly to form a lounge with a daybed nook, closed off when needed by patterned curtains. It’s a spatial move that feels considered rather than open-plan for its own sake. Work, daily life, hosting — everything overlaps naturally, the way it actually does in a home people live in fully.

Materials carry the warmth the bare frame alone couldn’t. Pale plastered walls, timber floors, coloured tiles and terrazzo in the kitchen and bathroom — a restrained palette chosen for how surfaces catch light through the large windows and surrounding trees rather than for how they photograph. The wooded hills of Hayama are present throughout the day in the way the light shifts across those surfaces, tying the interior to the landscape without a single piece of statement furniture doing the heavy lifting.

Upstairs, the more private rooms — bedrooms, a study overlooking the double-height living space below — step back from the openness of the ground floor without feeling disconnected from it. Hasegawa describes the house not as a finished work but as one that grows with daily life. For a home this attuned to how its spaces breathe and change with the seasons, that feels exactly right.

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This Hidden London Home Lives Behind a Garden Wall – And It’s Pure Genius

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Just past the southeast corner of Cleaver Square in Kennington, south London, sits a weathered brick wall with a painted timber gate. From the street, it looks like nothing more than a garden boundary — unremarkable, quiet, entirely in keeping with the 18th-century square around it. Step through the gate and the story changes completely.

Behind it is the Walled Courtyard house, a single-storey, two-bedroom home designed by London-based architecture studio Inglis Badrashi Loddo (IBLA). It is the first new house built on Cleaver Square in over 175 years — and it was designed to be invisible.

Designer: IBLA

The site, a modest 63 square metres, was formerly a car park. It once formed part of the walled garden of the Grade-II listed Georgian townhouse that sits adjacent to it. The owners of that townhouse commissioned IBLA to design a separate, accessible dwelling on the land — compact, light-filled, and historically sensitive.

IBLA didn’t fight the enclosure. They embraced it. The boundary walls were reconstructed using a combination of salvaged and new London stock brick, deliberately left without windows so the exterior reads as one continuous garden wall. Inside, those same walls are washed in lime-mortar paint, pulling light inward and immediately shifting the atmosphere. “The site is very compact, completely enclosed and inward-looking — our main goal was to create a bright and light-filled home that felt expansive and generous, despite the constraints,” said IBLA director Kim Loddo.

The layout unfolds around a central courtyard garden, with every main room connected to it through full-height sliding glass doors. The main bedroom and ensuite occupy the western end, with long sightlines running through to the kitchen and dining area at the centre. There, custom plywood cabinetry sits beneath a skylight that keeps the space bathed in natural light through the day. To the east, an adaptable room serves either as a second bedroom or a reading snug. The main bathroom, tucked into the curved corner of the site, is lit from above by a circular skylight.

A neutral palette runs throughout — white walls, whitewashed exposed timber roof joists, and grey porcelain flooring — with pocket doors that slide cleanly into wall recesses to keep sightlines open. The joists, as Loddo notes, do real structural work while lending the ceilings an honest rhythm.

For sustainability, the home relies on an air-source heat pump, underfloor heating, high-performance insulation, and a sedum roof that quietly completes its environmental credentials. What IBLA has built here is a masterclass in restraint. A home that holds its history close, hides from the street entirely, and reveals itself only to those who pass through the gate.

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Tucked Between Two Ancient Stumps, This House Barely Touches the Ground — And That’s Exactly the Point

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Some buildings earn their names. The Floating House by Vancouver-based SMStudio — completed in 2023 on the western ridge of Bowen Island, British Columbia — is one of them. Bowen Island sits just 20 minutes by ferry from Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay, close enough for a commute, far enough to feel like another world.

SMStudio founder Simon Montgomery found a site on a rocky ridge where two ancient, burnt-out old-growth stumps stand like sentinels over the land. Rather than clear them or work around them, he positioned the house directly between them. The building wasn’t placed on the land so much as fitted into it.

Designer: SMStudio

The name earns its keep. A cantilever lifts the structure fractionally off the bedrock, leaving a deliberate shadow gap at the base — a move that is at once structural and philosophical. The house appears to hover, weightless above the ground it occupies. It’s a gesture borrowed from Japanese spatial thinking, where the relationship between a building and its site is considered with almost ceremonial care.

The exterior reads as elemental: a steeply pitched gable roof clad in steel standing-seam panels, cedar walls left to weather naturally into the forest palette, and a form so spare it borders on sculptural. There is no decorative noise here. Every decision is load-bearing, aesthetically speaking. The plan is simple and asymmetrical, its two wings arranged to navigate the site’s dual elevations — a higher forested platform and an open field below that drops away to reveal sky and distant treeline.

Inside, Douglas fir surfaces carry the warmth that the cedar exterior withholds. Natural light is controlled and considered, the forest pressing in from every side without ever feeling intrusive. It is the kind of interior where you notice the quality of light before you notice the furniture.

What makes the Floating House significant isn’t scale or spectacle — it’s discipline. Montgomery resisted the temptation to over-design a site that was already extraordinary. The result is a house that amplifies its surroundings rather than competing with them. In an era when architecture often mistakes loudness for confidence, that kind of restraint is genuinely rare. The Floating House is currently listed for $2.1 million through West Coast Modern.

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