Homeowner Simon Doonan stands next to the front door. "We have flamboyance, and we’re not inhibited about anything. [Architect] Gray Organschi gave [the house] that intellectual rigor needed to make it beautiful. We were well matched."

The courtyard is just one of many open spaces that will be highly utilized—in the non-winter months anyway. Concrete worked well with developing the language of FlatPak. The second level is a wood panel that can be clad in corrugated metal or cedar—different layers that can be plugged in like covers on your cellphone.

Gaffney's cousin lives in the house just in front. To give a bit of perspective, this photo was likely taken just feet in front of the waist-high wall that runs between the two houses's yards.

A familiar scene in the Benoit home: Peter paints at the Steelcase desk—"I do all my work here," he says—while Ando sits nearby, waiting for attention.

Collage, designed by Stephen Ormandy: “The design was influenced by the floating nature of lily pads and the opportunity to combine individual sculptural shapes into a cohesive useful object”.

The Premaydena House by Misho+Associates was designed as a "box within a box," in which two interior structures—an open-plan living space and two en suite bedrooms—sit within an exterior envelope. Inspired by the region’s fiery orange lichen and the indigenous waratah shrub’s bright flowers, the colorful exterior panels are made of heavy-duty galvanized steel to guard from Tasmanian winds, which can reach up to 60 miles per hour.

A good dose of inspiration from Luis Barragán turned a dark and beleaguered midcentury house into a family home for the ages. The paint colors chosen by the residents and architect Linda Taalman are American Cheese and Blushing Bride, both by Benjamin Moore, creating a tapestry of color and texture.

Inspired by the sea and sand, Richard and Jackie Willcocks chose blue and orange joinery colors for their 1,140-square-foot prefab. The modular home is by New South Wales company ArchiBlox.

The back of the house has sliding doors that open far enough to expose the entire livingroom to the families' back yard.

In February of 2007, two San Francisco art and travel addicts purchased a 3,200-square-foot former Chinese laundry and tooth-powder factory with column-free interiors and a zigzagging sawtooth roof in lower Pacific Heights. They customized a pair of shipping containers to accommodate their collection and reflect their passions, and hired a local company to sandblast the interior to expose the board-formed concrete walls and replace the carpeted floors with Georgia hickory pecan planks to further lengthen the loft and make it look more like a warehouse.

A new addition to Sea Ranch’s enclave of utopian homes, this structure (and the separate guesthouse seen here) clad in rough concrete and Cor-ten steel seamlessly blends in with its half-a-century-old California neighbors. Designed by the dean of the Woodbury School of Architecture and the head of the University of Oregon’s architecture department, its spaces flow into one another underneath an angled plywood ceiling and illuminate built-in furniture crafted from vertical-grain Douglas fir.

The Perth residence of Renee Coleman via the Design Files.

On one side of the house, a white central staircase leads to a split-level landing the Robertsons call "the reading room." "We needed a place to hang out and for the kids to read," explains owner Vivi Nguyen-Robertson. Awaiting the birth of the couple's son, she relaxes in a built-in reading nook in the library.

Roberto Burneo designed this home for his eldest niece, her husband, and their three young children in a suburb outside Quito, the capital of Ecuador. The house is set on a flat expanse of land with fruit trees, and Burneo's design "guides the social areas inward in order to link them to the gardens.”

The ground-floor sauna, one of the home’s central gathering spots, is built from stained alder. The electric heater is from the Finnish company Iki.

Burneo took advantage of the perpendicular orientation of the volumes to create outdoor spaces that look out to the gardens.

Designed in 1960, the house was originally a lodge to accommodate horse trails. Throughout the years, the house has expanded with various additions and renovations.

Sawn wood planks add texture to the interior walls.

Burneo oriented the house in a pair of perpendicular volumes. The ground floor houses the public areas, including a study, while the top volume, housing the bedrooms and a family room, is oriented north-south, allowing for warm sunlight and a visual orientation toward the gardens.

When the Casali family gave Michael Krus and Prishram Jain of TACT Architecture free rein to work with unconventional materials, the architects responded by creating a geometric 4,300-square-foot smart home encased in aluminum panels by Agway Metals. The front facade features Cor-Ten steel fabricated by Praxy Cladding.

The custom kitchen counters are concrete, and the yellow dining chairs add a welcome splash of color.

“There’s a presence to that place—it’s vast, and constantly shifting,” Moffitt says. “It was clear that this house should be an observation shed for the changing landscape beyond.”

Burneo added exposed brick to his palette of interior materials.

The bedroom—accessible via the living room—is where the couple will place a bassinet for their newborn.

An Alvar Aalto table is surrounded by a quartet of the designer’s Chair 65.

Some 35 percent of the materials from the renovation were resurrected in the yard: Redwood panels became fencing. Blocks cut from original concrete patios form the snake wall. And Purdy plans to crochet colorful cozies over various branches and stumps.

How a highly productive collaboration among a trio of creative Angelenas—and a good dose of Barragán—turned a dark and beleaguered midcentury house into a family home for the ages.

With little to no permitting required because of its small size, Sett Studio units can be used for an extra bedroom, a yoga studio, a hydroponics growing area or an office space, like this 96-square-foot one shown here.

Clad in Western red cedar siding and punctuated with floor-to-ceiling windows, this minimalist two-bedroom home boasts sunrise views over the Sonoma hills.

On a trip to Naoshima, Japan, the Houston newlyweds behind Robertson Design fell in love with Tadao Ando’s concrete-composed museums. This led the couple to create a residence of their own comprised of a low concrete wall, concrete cube, and box clad in Siberian larch. The indoors are rounded out with white oak, marble, and leather-finished granite.

Florida couple John Pirman and Steve Tetreault built a new house inspired by the Sarasota School. Today’s FEMA codes required a plinth to lift the house five-and-a-half feet above grade and a roof that can withstand hurricane wind loads, making it a challenge to re-create the lightness of midcentury design, Pirman says.

The low windows in the master bedroom focus the view on the backyard, not the neighbors. Christopher designed the solid poplar platform bed.

Architect Jesse Garlick’s rural Washington vacation home references its rugged surroundings. The steel cladding has developed a patina similar to the ochre-red color of bedrock found in the area.

Harper sits on the porch just off the entrance. James notes that the children spend their time “swimming in the dam, feeding the chickens, and riding their ponies or bikes. It’s really just the simple stuff that we had when we grew up in the late ’70s and ’80s."

Playing off the work of artist James Turrell, as well as the front porch scheme prevalent in the South, an outside living room of the Lewin House by Dencity is half covered and half open to the leaf canopy overhead. A pair of teak armchairs are clustered around a Laguna fire table from Restoration Hardware.