Torontonians Dan and Diane Molenaar head north to Drag Lake when they need a weekend away from urban life—though they brought some of the city with them. The mirrored windows that circle the cottage were recycled from two office towers in Toronto.

"We did our best to tuck the buildings into the site—the goal was to get up high on a perch. It was a matter of setting that elevation and working back down with the topography," says architectural designer Riley Pratt.

Sævik compares her house to a contemplative hideout. “It’s very quiet,” she says. “You can concentrate and let thoughts fly.” Her favorite summer pastimes include reading, painting, drawing, yoga, and “just sitting and feeling the forest,” she says.

Waechter Architecture reimagined a traditional gabled home in southeast Portland without significantly altering the original building. A simple coat of red paint abstracts the century-old structure, creating a residential work of art.

At the base of Echo Mountain in Phoenix, a geometric home by Wendell Burnette opens up to the surrounding desert landscape. Photo by Dean Kaufman.

House O, designed by Jun Igarashi, forgoes hallways and interior doors in favor of casually interconnected rooms.

Marcus Lee and Rachel Hart’s wonderful wooden home sits at the end of a quiet London lane and politely turns its back on the workshops next door.

Corporate high-flyers and admitted neat freaks Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton couldn’t handle the chaos anymore. Read more about this Victorian terrace in London here.

Alex Gil and Claudia DeSimio created a duplex in an apartment building where they’d been renting for years in Brooklyn, New York, and set to work gutting the interior and adding a new rooftop addition clad in panels of Cor-Ten steel.

"How would a kid draw a house?" architect Per Franson asked himself when designing the Olivero-Reinius family home. The simple prefab structure’s unusual color comes from a traditional source: falu rödfärg, the historic mineral paint that gives the region’s famous barns their red color.

The large windows let in fresh breezes and provide an opportunity for the owners to jump out of the house and into the water.

The inspiration for this prefabricated, modular family home on Fishers Island, New York, were the views that Tanney and Luntz saw from a 12-foot stepladder, which was balancing on the bed of a pickup truck when they first visited the site.

Home Renovation Tip: Get an Understanding of What’s Already Around

Many tiny home dwellers develop eco-friendly habits when they downsize—like adopting a capsule wardrobe, carpooling more, and harvesting rainwater.

The architect chose granite for the house’s base, zinc for its roof, and Scandinavian pinewood for cladding—all materials that complement the nearby gray stone building.

Architect Paul Hinkin and his partner, Chrissy Pearce, bought and restored a 538-square-foot Deckhouse at Emsworth Yacht Harbour in Hampshire, England.

The Desert House located in Desert Hot Springs is a steel structure designed with large expansive windows, and concrete flooring.

With the help of builder Peter Watts, the couple returned the house to its original early-1970s glory, utilizing the space beneath for both boat and car.

A Simple Plan A Marmol Radziner–designed prefab house, trucked onto a remote Northern California site, takes the pain out of the construction process.

The Floating Farmhouse’s semitransparent addition has a roofline that matches the pitch of the original 1820s farmhouse. A porch, tucked under the side eaves, is cantilevered over a stream that runs through the property. Ikea loungers are illuminated from the interior by commercial gymnasium lights repurposed as pendant lamps.

The exterior features vertical, untreated cedar panels. “We tried to use materials that are beautiful in their natural state without excessive treatment or finishing,” Pavonetti says.

Architect Sven Matt mixed basic shapes with rich details in this Austrian home. The lattice shell was hewn from silver fir sourced from a nearby forest. Eternit shingles clad the roof.

A small country road borders the property to the west.

Composed of primarily steel, this prefab home has sufficient outdoor space. Photo by: Daniel Hennessy

In the shadow of Denali mountain, amid Alaska’s meadows and icy streams, a former teacher and a four-time Iditarod winner calls upon Mayer Sattler-Smith to design a modernist cabin as expansive as the Last Frontier.

Architect Oliver Lang and his partner, Cindy Wilson, created Monad, a multiunit prefab prototype in Vancouver.

Behind an unassuming 19th-century facade in Singapore's Joo Chiat neighborhood, Ching Ian and Yang Yeo's renovation of a typical shophouse venerates tradition while looking squarely to the future. Photo by Richard Powers

Architect Lorcan O’Herlihy created a remarkable residence for himself and his wife, Cornelia, just off Pacific Avenue in Venice, California. Photos by: Misha Gravenor

London based photographer, Ed Reeve used dark cedar to achieve his lifelong goal: to build his own house on a perfect plot of land located in De Beauvoir Town. Photos by: Ed Reeve

Hale and Maisie peer out of one of the living-room windows, from where Edmonds (pictured at left with Pippa) dreams about installing a zip-line directly to their garden patch.

When Belgian fashion retailer Nathalie Vandemoortele was seeking a new nest for her brood, she stumbled upon a fortresslike house in the countryside designed in 1972 by a pair of Ghent architects, Johan Raman and Fritz Schaffrath. While the Brutalist concrete architecture and petite but lush gardens suited her tastes to a tee, the interiors needed a few updates.

The Shayan House takes full advantage of its canyon site.

The main building sinks then elevates in full view of ocean.

Various groupings of succulents were planted to accent and obscure the home's relationship to its surrounding environment. Photo by: Daniel Hennessy

In the land of large mountain lodge wannabes, two California natives tuck Utah’s first LEED for Homes–rated house onto the side of Emigration Canyon. Photo by Dustin Aksland

On the opposite side of the abstract front elevation, the home opens up and presents an entirely different viewing experience. “Like a flower leaning [towards the] sunlight, the architectural volumes pull and open up towards the views of the lake,” says Miller. A stacked timber retaining wall serves both structural and aesthetic functions; in addition to holding back the earth the home has been buried into, it visually defines the its perimeter.