Steel allowed Kunding to be playful with the staircase’s form.

Inspired by the Sydney Opera House, architects Andrew Maynard and Mark Austin paid careful attention to the extension’s “fifth elevation"—the way it’s seen from the sky. Its tiny houses, clustered at the southern end of the property, are clad in white steel panels and western red cedar shingles, contrasting materials that emphasize their geometric forms.

A glowing home in Japan has milky-white, one-and-a-half-inch plastic sheets wrapped around the exterior to let in light and provide insulation.

Unlike its next-door neighbor, R-House, TED wasn’t originally planned to meet the exacting Passive House standard. The building’s green bona fides came largely from four roof-mounted thermal solar panels and a 120-gallon water storage tank that architect Tim McDonald attests would have met nearly all of the home’s heat and hot-water needs. After submitting the proposal, though, he completed a course in the Passive House standard. Inspired, McDonald modified the original approach, ditching the tank and thermal panels in favor of a highly insulated, airtight envelope—the equivalent, he says, of shielding the house from the harsh Syracuse winter with a fur coat instead of a windbreaker.

Typography guru Erik Spiekermann and his wife, designer Susanna Dulkinys, hate clutter. That’s why they love the super-sleek Berlin domicile they constructed to have just the right lines—and a host of energy-saving features behind the scenes. The stainless-steel Bulthaup kitchen "cost as much as a small house," said Spiekermann, though he did get a discount: Bulthaup is one of his clients.

In Scandinavian regions, traditional cabins are painted black using a mixture of tar and linseed oil. Peck reproduced the look using corrugated metal—a lower-maintenance, more sustainable material. “We love that it is black, because it really reminds us of home,” Bronee says. The house has no windows on its front side, belying its light-flooded interior.

Corrugated steel ceilings are left exposed—a reminder that this is, after all, a container converted into a home. Spray foam insulation keeps the space from experiencing extreme temperature shifts.

In Sitges, Spain, Olson Kunding crafted a live-work house for two artists. Large panels of steel arch from the ground over the entrance, curving to create part of the building’s roof. Materials with a strong industrial aesthetic, including untreated steel and cast-in-place concrete, are used in the entry sequence, while the rear of the building opens to the landscape. Photo by: Nikolas Koenig.

The steel canopy protects the residents from Seattle’s notoriously rainy weather as they walk from the entry gate to the front door.

The exterior of the house consists of sandblasted masonry and Ferrari shade sails stretched on a steel frame.

Julie Torres Moskovitz, who designed New York’s first certified Passive House, recently finished her first book, The Greenest Home (Princeton Architectural Press), about the first wave of ultragreen homes in the United States (following the 40,000 already constructed in Europe). The title hits shelves in May 2013. Here, a custom stainless steel stair with treads of perforated steel replaces the old wood staircase in the rehabbed Park Slope brownstone.

Wooten asked Massie to incorporate a 1960s steel screen by Don Drumm into the house; Massie placed it on a central pivot so it acts as a gate, a privacy barrier, and an architectural gesture. “We actually changed the whole roofline of the porch to accommodate the screen being able to pivot,” says Massie. “The screen also allowed the building to have an immediate history.” dondrummstudios.com

Embedded in the rugged southern Australian landscape, the House at Hanging Rock comprises three volumes connected by a sweeping rhomboid roof. The Colorbond steel overhang is in a dark-gray shade called Monument.

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."

“I made a very conscious decision, when I realized that the house with nothing in it was such a fantastic work of art,” says Greg Wooten, “to go out of my way to pull back and only select pieces that complemented the architecture and would allow both the house and the furniture to breathe.” The place is furnished minimally with vintage finds he chose for the rooms over time.

To mirror the mountaintop, Wibowo drew three points at the top of the roof (one at the apex, two at intermediate points), then connected all the walls off at least one of those points. The result is a jagged yet sliding set of angles capping the structure. Inside, the top of the house is like a bright white snowcap.

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.

The clients and design team chose to forego an open floor plan in favor of defined, separated spaces. In this scheme, the vertically oriented spaces act as a cinematic "hard-cut" to their horizontal counterparts. The custom hot rolled steel kitchen, one of these vertical transition spaces, receives light from above through a Velux skylight. A GE Profile Induction cooktop and oven and Miele refrigerator complete the space.

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.

“In this house, the roof is the only facade—the rest is dissolved beneath it.” —Architect Aljoša Dekleva

At the entry looking upward towards a Velux skylight, a vertical "sleeve" is made of stacked end grain plywood. The theme of vertical and horizontal architectural elements providing different environmental perspectives carries through to the rest of the home. Horizontal forms look out to the lake, while the vertical columns look up the sky.

Seen in the architectural context of its London neighborhood, the house is all the more extraordinary: compact, materially innovative, and easy on the eyes.

“We took away a very thick, heavy staircase that led to the loft, and designed one that had a much lighter look,” Wåhlin says. “The new one, made of steel, looks simple and indeed light—but is in fact super heavy and was a real challenge to construct.”

The Helios Fire Bowl Set from Skagerak is a portable outdoor fireplace that is ideal for a back patio. It can be used as a fire pit, or with the Helios Steel Grille and some charcoal to create an outdoor grill for hotdogs, vegetables, or shish kebabs.

A steel spiral staircase efficiently links all three floors. With no interior doors, Yurika can keep an ear on the shop from upstairs while maintaining the privacy of her home with the help of the vertical distance.

Carport doors swing open to the alley outside of the studio, where the property extends enough for additional landscaping. The corrugated steel siding comes from a surplus from a nearby apartment building. “There’s a lot of urban infill potential in Seattle’s neighborhoods,” Wittman remarks. “We’re catching up to older, denser cities in this regard.”

The staircase leading to the master suite features aluminum treads supported on stainless steel tubes. "We wanted something that would allow the resin panels behind it to reflect the light from the windows at the top of the stair," Slade says.

A steel-beam canopy with solar panels shades the house and provides electricity.

The 925-square-foot house Maggie Treanor calls home blends into the landscape somewhat; with a galvanized steel shed roof and siding, it looks like a high-design little brother to the barns on the surrounding farms.

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.

“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.”

Conceived as a glass wall or window that could swing open rather than a typical door, the resulting glass-and-metal piece is so heavy that it required its own foundation! Thanks to clever engineering by Sand Studios, even seven-year-old Macy can operate the 2,000-pound door.