Wood sculptor Silvia Song's studio is located in her former garage in Berkeley, California.

Song waxes poetic about her medium. "Wood is constantly in flux, even when it has been felled," she says. "It is a breathing material. It expands and contracts, depending on its environment. I work with wood because it primordial to me. It feels like an intuitive process to study wood. I need to understand and work with it and allow it to become what it wants to be." The round cole jaw and chucks she uses on her lathe hang on a wall in her studio.

Patricia Urquiola (born 1961)

Stefano Boeri (born 1956)

Renzo Piano (born 1937)

Song exhibited these wood vessels at Heath Ceramics. "I first started with the very basic form, which is a bowl," Song says. "While it may seem pretty simple, I feel that it took me months to understand the technical aspects of working with wood and the lathe. After a year of turning, 500 or so bowls and pieces later, I am bit more comfortable but I am many years away from fully understanding the craft."

Song's inspirations include Dieter Rams, Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and Peter Zumthor ("The use of materials in each of his buildings is ethereal," she says). Books about the icons rest on her studio's shelves, along with an armada of chisels, clamps, and hammers.

She produces everything herself, by hand, without any assistants in her studio. For a bowl, she typically starts with a block of wood, inspects it for cracks and knots, trims it down to size on a bandsaw or chainsaw, and then cuts it into a round blank that gets mounted onto a lathe—a tool which rotates an object on an axis. She shapes exterior of the bowl, sands the exterior, then mounts it onto a chuck to turn the inside using a bowl gouge. After mounting the bowl onto a cole jaw to remove the tenon (a stump of the wood that's used to mount the bowl to the chuck), Song then applies oil and wax to the finished piece. She typically uses sugar maple and claro walnut, two woods that are readily available. "Sugar maple is quite dense and the grains are very consistent whereas Walnut is much more porous," she describes.

Song collaborated with natural dyer Kristine Vejar on a line of indigo-dyed maple bowls for March. "She is an expert natural dyer, a teacher and an artist who's received numerous accolades for her work," she says. "Vejar spent some time as a participatory artist in the Berkeley Art Museum's The Possible exhibit. I had not worked with traditional Japanese indigo dying before but have had some curiosity to dying wood with a natural dye, instead of chemical dyes."

Song's walnut nesting bowls are available from Kaufman Mercantile.

The Sing Song shelving system is completely customizable.

The new extension wraps around the existing home, creating a thoughtful dialogue between past and present, and opening the home up to the landscape and the constant song of running water. “We wanted to work sympathetically with the existing home and mill,” says homeowner Miriam Nabarro.

“Designing a house is like writing a song: You try as best you can and you have to finish at some point. You’re probably best to write another song than driving yourself mad.”—Jamie Norton, resident

This earthenware bowl is by the Austrian-born team of Gertrude and Otto Natzler. It's from 1943.

In the bedroom, a Sonos Play:5 is connected to Amazon Echo, enabling the residents to cycle through songs and podcasts using voice commands.

The details of the Sing Song shelf celebrate its natural materials and simple construction.

2nd Floor Hallway. More of this incredible railing. By changing out the floor systems, we were able to expose these incredible carrying beams that, really, make the space. The painting is the lyrics of Bill Wither's song Lovely Day. I painted this for my daughter to be placed over her crib when she was born. It is one of my all time favorite songs.....in one of my all time favorite hallways!

The city and its various parts can be seen as a music score, the edifices acting as notes played by different instruments simultaneously. Gentle Genius is born in a disrupted part of the city, aiming to generate awareness of the critical current condition.

Irish-born actress Cornelia Hayes-O’Herlihy gazes across the Venetian roofscape. Her cozy glass enclosure rests atop the new home designed by her husband, architect Lorcan O’Herlihy.

Smart home integration let you control the lights with your voice, set scenes, and display the temperature from a Nest thermostat, air quality and humidity from a Netatmo Weather Station, or the name of the song playing on your Sonos.

This recently listed home designed by Wisconsin-born architect John Randall McDonald is sited on a 1.20-acre, wooded lot about 15 miles outside of Milwaukee. A single horizontal plane extends from the rectangular structure to form a carport and mark the main entrance.

Schneidman House and owner, Kristin MacDowell (MHA 301). In 1946, a group of returning servicemen began talks of creating a housing cooperative to build a utopian community on a dusty hillside above Los Angeles. Soon, more than 400 families were on board, and the Mutual Housing Association was born.

“My grandfather, George Fasullo, was an architect who died before I was born,” says architect Ryan Bollom. “My mom used both of our drawings as wallpaper in the secondary living space.” During the lockdown, Bollom formed an extended bubble with his parents, and he and his wife, also an architect, used the space as an office.

Pearson and Trent furnished the house with lamps and chairs they culled from vintage stores in the area. They found the overstuffed leather lounger at Surfing Cowboys in Venice. The couple and the architects collaborated on the couch design and had it fabricated. Works by local artists fill their home, such as the white vessels by California-based, Japanese-born ceramicist Shio Kusaka.

The menu features creations from Mallorcan-born Michelin-kitchen veteran chef Vicente Fortea.

Here, Smith sits on a vintage rosewood bench designed by the Swiss-born British architect Richard Seifert.

The living room features a pair of 1920s chairs by Hungarian-born New York designer Ilonka Karasz.

Sited on a sloping plot in Suffolk County, New York, this cantilevered house takes full advantage of its forest-meets-sea locale. Designed, built, and furnished by New York City-based firm Leroy Street Studio, this 5,935-square-foot home was born from the client's request to create a warm and stylish modernist house that would be intimate enough for private family retreats, yet impressive and expansive enough for entertaining large groups.

"What’s cool is as you go around the building, no two faces are the same. They all represent different moments from Gust of Wind," says lead architect Mansoor Kaze, who used Williams’ song as inspiration. The zig-zagging facade seems that it’s nothing more than a loose visual interpretation of the song’s wave form.

64-year-old, Polish-born Alexsander Doba set of from Senegal in a solo, man-powered kayak and crossed the Atlantic to Brazil.

"It was rundown, dark, and divided," recalls Masaaki of his first impression of the warehouse, the ground floor of a multistory apartment building. But after some thought, Masaaki, a Japanese-born architect, and Esther, an artist from Minorca, realized that owning the combined 2,700 square feet would allow them to headquarter Mas-aqui, the architecture and design firm they were planning to start, on-site. They bought the property and within months transformed it into a bright, modern live/work space.

The second-story viewing platform was born from an onsite discovery. After framing the first level, Patch Work Architecture noticed a vista to the west and decided to add a window.

Silver plated Double Vegetable Dish designed by Russian-born American designer Belle Kogan in 2936 for Reed and Barton in Taunton, Massachusetts.

Block-printed cotton textile panel by Hungarian-born American-based designer George Farkas circa 1948. Possibly manufactured by Spectrum.

Home of American-born architect Johanna Molineus, this 678-square-foot apartment in central London breaks and bends conventions to make the most of the compact space.