Could this be a nature lover’s dream come true? The concept of the tree house has always been on everyone´s childhood memories, as a kind of sacred place for joy and everlasting happiness. Baumraum has turned this shared passion into a reality: the Treehouse. Continue reading →

The House with Eaves and an Attic (yes, there is a house there, behind the huge roof) is situated on a small plot at the top of a hill in Tokyo. The aim was to create a spectacular appearance of a building and to utilize all the space you possibly can out of the dramatically small site on the edge of the slope. Continue reading →

Do you believe in fairy tales? Let me tell you one. Inside Montemor-o-Velho Castle in Portugal, we find a contemporary building that´s reoccupying the medieval Princesses Palace…of which little is known and almost nothing is left, except for the ruins of the ancient walls that seemingly bounded somewhere in the past. Now the memory remains suspended in the present, in the intimacy of the Tea House. Continue reading →

Alchemy Architects declare: Everyone loves barns. As they describe their Blair Barn House project in Wisconsin. Somehow it didn’t persuade me. Why should I love barns…Is there something I’m missing here? I went to explore this object only because the look of the building in the landscape seemed interesting to me. I came to the conclusion that it is a nice cube house.
The most peculiar thing about the shape of the building is that the edges of the cube are twisted, so that the whole silhouette seems odd, uneven, friendly and interesting. This outline is better readable also due to the position of the house – it is located at the top of a small hill. Continue reading →

Imagine there´s a house for emergency, made out of recycled shipping containers. The Future Shack can be described as fully recyclable and self-sustainable piece of architecture!

Australian architect, Sean Godsell, developed a prototype house that has applications for a variety of needs, for example homeless people, victims of natural disasters, third world housing, or simply as temporary housing in any part of the world. Continue reading →

This small prefab home is located in Northern Minnesota and doesn’t even resemble a prefab house; mostly because of a special local siding – the red stained pine.

I like this mixture of the universal (you can buy a prefab house, like a furniture item, and put it wherever you’ld like) and the local (when various local peculiarities are applied to the project, like the siding element here).
Plus, the house sits very well on the site, having an open deck overlooking a forest, and an upper terrace on the roof of the one-story part of the building. Continue reading →

Located in Austria, Amalia House is 733 sq. ft. large and serves as a holiday home. It’s sweet that the house is named after the owner’s grandmother and it seems to have its own symbolic meaning, since the house gathers the family members from all over the country.

There are two bedrooms on the first floor and a sleeping place available in the living room. The ground floor is a rather narrow but long room, which is functionally divided into the living room and the space of kitchen and eating by the floor level difference of three steps. This level difference not only helps to psychologically segregate an open plan space of the ground floor but also repeats the natural line of a slope the building is situated on. Continue reading →

An old barn provides a place for music creation. Is there something more poetic and inspirational than that? Atelier Bardill by Valerio Olgiati occupies the site of a former barn in the protected historical villagescape of Scharans, Switzerland.

Built on a land´s plot at the old center of the Swiss village, the form of a small volume (only 240 sq. m.) engages in dialogue with pre-existing construction, sheltering a studio for a musician in a single space that opens onto a large courtyard. Continue reading →

The client of this residence is an artist and apparently not a struggling one. The building stands somewhere in the desert landscape of Central Idaho, has the size of 3,686 sq. ft. and is meant not only for living, but also as a working studio and for exhibiting artworks.

Looking at these pictures, at least one thing is clear: the artist will definitely have the opportunity to work undisturbed, not bothered by the street noise (I can’t even see the access road!). Continue reading →

Somewhere in Kunamoto, Japan, nestled among lavish green landscapes was born the ultimate statement of wooden architecture. Sou Fujimoto is the creator of a masterpiece: the Wooden Hut.

In this 15, 13 sq.m. cube-shaped mountain shelter, cedar wood timbers establish the only rule that fulfills all the following functions: exterior and interior walls, ceiling and floor, furnishing and stairs, even window frames. In fact, this unique mountain cabin is basically conceived by stacks of 350mm square timbers, joined together. Continue reading →