Britto Charette Brings Grandeur To A 1980’s Indianapolis House

2024 Best of Year Winner for Small Residential Renovation

The issues with this 1980’s house in Indianapolis began with the rinky-dink foyer. Between it and the living room was a powder room, which left something to be desired in terms of privacy. The foyer also had, on one side, steps up to a narrow corridor leading to the library. To bring grandeur to this entry sequence, Britto Charette had the powder room demolished, which allowed the foyer to be expanded and opened up to the living room as well as the corridor to the library to be widened. Then, slabs of diamond-matched Calacatta Green marble that reach the ceiling were installed around the living room’s fireplace, adding a sense of monumentality. An addition at the rear of the house was also transformative. It yielded a windowed alcove in the library and, directly above the alcove, on the second floor, a seating area in the main bedroom suite that overlooks the property’s verdant grounds.

PROJECT TEAM: JAY BRITTO; DAVID CHARETTE; VANIA GARCIA.

Singapore’s First 3-D Printed House Is Retro-Futuristic

2024 Best of Year Winner for Medium City House

The first 3-D printed house in Singapore pays homage to the planet’s first energy source, the sun, via a conical central form rising multiple stories and terminating with an oculus above the ground-floor dining area. Vents at the base allow hot air to rise through the cone, where it’s disbursed by a passive turbo extractor fan on the roof. A heat pump for water, meanwhile, generates waste cool air that passively chills the circular staircase as it leads to the mezzanine, second story, and attic, each with their own bedrooms and bathrooms. The aesthetic of the 6,000-square-foot residence by Park + Associates is appropriately retro-futuristic. And while the prototype might be the first of its kind, with results like this, it certainly won’t be the last.

PROJECT TEAM: LIM KOON PARK; CHRISTINA THEAN; JUTHATHONG RUTCHATANUNTAKIT; ESTHER WONG.

Rain Gardens Nourish The Land Around This Striking Home

2024 Best of Year Winner for Residential Landscape

Just a mile or so from the Atlantic Ocean and sited in a low-lying flood zone adjacent to a picturesque farm field, this just over 1-acre property in Sagaponack, New York, by LaGuardia Design Group is part sponge, part residence of the future. FEMA necessitated the house stand some 10 feet above-grade; terraced steps and decking (complete with a built-in fire table) bring it down to earth. As for that earth, it’s nourished by flowering rain gardens that slow stormwater, capture site runoff, and attract pollinators with year-round plantings, while cutting gardens in raised steel boxes attract the eye. The design of the infinity-edge pool ensures it won’t flood; all the greenery helps to ensure the land won’t, either.

PROJECT TEAM: CHRISTOPHER LAGUARDIA; DANIEL THORP; SARAH DEGRAY.

Sustainability Is Baked Into The Blueprint Of This Caribbean Home

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large City House

Residences located in tropical areas like the Caribbean must strike the right balance between maximizing and mitigating the ample resources of sun, breeze, and rain. Such was the case for this house, designed around natural ventilation. The 16,400-square-foot structure by Moneo Brock takes the form of a trio of travertine-clad concrete platforms—each set at a slightly different level to follow the topography—anchoring a grid of steel columns that in turn support vaulted brick roofs. Walls are alternately sliding glass, fully open, or composed of wooden louvers; on the property’s street-facing side, a screen wall built of local stone hushes traffic noise. Sustainability is baked in: Solar panels harness sunlight, large cisterns collect rainwater used to feed the numerous ponds and pools that cool the interior, and tanks beneath the main slab purify blackwater for household use.

PROJECT TEAM: BELÉN MONEO; JEFFREY BROCK; FEDERICO PÉREZ; JAVIER DEL POZO; FRANCISCO BLAZQUEZ; PEDRO ARNANZ; ISMAEL SANZ; YAIZA CAMACHO.

How Brutalism Shapes This Chic Australian Home

2024 Best of Year Winner for Medium Country House

Set on a grassy knoll with distant views over Bass Strait, this 8,100-square-foot, two-level beach house in Sorrento, Australia, uses board-formed concrete with a virtuosic ease that the masters of European and Brazilian brutalism might envy. Partially embedded in the hillock, the podium base contains guest accommodations, recreational spaces, and a cast-concrete staircase that spirals upward like a pleated ribbon to the main living quarters above. Upstairs, architect Travis Walton broadens the material palette: stained-oak paneling in some rooms; a blackened-steel media wall in the living area; and patinated-brass cabinetry, a black marble backsplash, and a dark-green stone island in the kitchen. Designer Simone Haag has furnished the light-filled interiors with a treasure trove of contemporary production and craft pieces, including Patricia Urquiola chairs surrounding a marble-topped dining table designed by the homeowner.

Inside A Mountain Chalet In Montana With Sweeping Views

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Country House

The extreme weather conditions of a site 8,400 feet above sea level informed nearly every aspect of this 9,000-square-foot home in Big Sky, Montana. O’Neill Rose Architects positioned it in a cut in Lone Mountain to block harsh northwest winds, then built a tall stone base that withstands 12-foot-tall snowbanks and extends to support a cantilevered volume with views of the Spanish Peaks. The main inspiration came from timber snow fences, which are used across the American West to protect cattle from drifting snow. The design team translated the concept into a shou sugi ban–treated wood screen that wraps the upper level; it artfully captures snow in the facade and shelters outdoor areas like the hot tub terrace. Inside, a geothermal heating system, high-performance insulation, and triple-glazed windows form an energy-efficient cocoon. Fluted ash millwork references the mountain’s pole pines, and sculptural plaster ceilings recall snow drifts, creating serene spaces in constant dialogue with nature.

Behold This Century-Old Edwardian Townhouse Reno In Toronto

Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighborhood is home to art galleries, Polish eateries, a farmer’s market, and verdant parks. It’s also where photographer Andrew Rowat, whose award-winning work has appeared in Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair, now resides. After stints working in Shanghai and New York, the global denizen returned to the city with his wife and newborn son looking to purchase a home in 2019. “It was a year of firsts,” recalls Rowat, who settled on a quaint, century-old Edwardian townhouse in the hip enclave.

Rowat had no intention of making major changes to the two-story home, other than a simple appliance upgrade in the kitchen. The layout proved challenging, however, so Rowat sought help from his former officemate and longtime friend, architect Delnaz Yekrangian. “Like most Toronto semi-detached homes on relatively deep lots, daylight had to be ‘dragged’ inside,” recalls the architect, who suggested opening the main floor for maximum sight lines and adding skylights, among other features. “In the software business, it’s called ‘scope creep’,” laughs Rowat, who tapped another colleague, Hong Kong-based designer Daniel Fintzi, to collaborate for the grueling facelift. “Fortunately, all three of us are very detailed-oriented,” notes Rowat. “As a photographer adept in leveraging natural light, he was the perfect client,” concurs Yekrangian.

The trio worked asynchronously, aiming to marry form and function wherever possible while maintaining the home’s 2,000-square-foot envelope and historic character. Old Canadian houses lack closet space, Rowat explained, hence a slew of built-ins: cubbies, drawers, benches and nooks for optimal storage, and uprights meant to mimic two-by-four beams delineating the entryway. A wall-hung toilet allows for additional counterspace in the powder room. Upstairs, Fintzi designed a spacious full bath with heated large-format porcelain tile flooring and marble countertops, specifically cut so the veins flow continuously from backsplash to counter to overhang.

In the formerly cramped kitchen, expansive Corian countertops host a bevy of custom features like an integrated knife strip, induction mobile charging, and discrete cutting boards. A tabletop extends from a lower drawer that can be folded away after use, and an 8-foot louvered ceiling diffuses atmospheric light while concealing the Bluestar range’s exhaust pipe. “The ceiling is often an overlooked canvas for creativity and function,” concurs Rowat.

Fond of Japanese and Scandinavian design principles, the homeowner embraced a wabi-sabi approach through a reductive palette of white-painted walls and pale millwork with Canadian maple flooring, complementing the dwelling’s original brickwork. Rowat debated repointing the latter but ended up keeping it as-is. “Cracks and missing mortar all tell a story of sorts,” he muses. “I enjoy looking at my photographs hanging from this brick that was made more than a century ago.” A large-format print of Kazakhstan’s former Hotel Aral adorns the coat closet, another, of Gaudí’s Basilica of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, adds drama to the dining area.

Rowat’s 20-year career is evident elsewhere, with furnishings and fixtures curated by fellow artists and industry connections. He discovered Vancouver-based lighting studio Bocci after an assignment shooting the co-founder Omer Arbel for T Magazine. Arbel’s pearlescent ovoid chandelier and globular table lamp adorn the dining room, opaque red and yellow orbs appear near the entryway. “Almost every piece or decision in the house comes from some sort of a personal connection,” reflects Rowat.

In total, the renovation took eight months, give or take a few straggling pieces. Rowat, for his part, is pleased. “I have often thought of the home as a palimpsest, where each subsequent owner adds a layer of their own to the underlying manuscript,” opines the photographer.

Peruse Andrew Rowat’s Toronto Transformation

How This Earthy Sydney Home Embraces Multiple Eras

No matter how contemporary, every residence is informed by history. This was doubly the case for Australian firm Studio Prineas’ transformation of a home in Sydney. The clients purchased a house on a tree-lined street and brought in Studio Prineas to craft a warm residence that would encourage connection for their family. The firm, founded in 2004 by architect and principal Eva-Marie Prineas, has a reputation for understanding unique ways to integrate the old and the new. Studio Prineas’ work—both architecture and interior design—accommodated two generations and nodded to the existing architecture and landscape. “The process was a reinvention to suit our clients’ needs, and preserve and respect the heritage of the property,” Prineas explains.

The architect replaced older additions from previous renovations with a cohesive volume adjacent to the rear garden. In that living area, angular skylights and large windows bring in abundant natural light and frame views of the landscape. “Our clients fell in love with the mature gardens, therefore visual and physical connection to nature was a key part of their brief,” she notes. The space is anchored by a large Francesco Binfaré sofa in a hue that echoes the greenery outside.

Existing architectural elements also inspired the residence’s palette. “Throughout both the cottage and the new addition, spaces are bound by color-blocked applications of earthy, botanical tones derived from the home’s well-preserved heritage fireplaces,” she explains. Other materials in the home complement those tones—including brass, leather, and linen.  American white oak and rosy Tiberio marble add additional warmth. Vintage furniture is joined by contemporary pieces and colorful artwork. Lighting is a mix of mid-century classics, some by Le Corbusier, and contemporary fixtures, including a brass-and-glass chandelier by Snelling over the dining table. This embrace of eras helps create one united space for family members at various stages of life.

Take A Stroll Through This Family Home In Sydney

Discover A Brazilian Modular Home Nestled In Nature’s Embrace

For the first three years of his life, Brazilian architect Rodrigo Ohtake lived in a São Paulo apartment building designed by his father, Ruy, and named for his grandmother, Tomie, a renowned abstract artist who painted the tower’s white facade with oscillating bands of color. Completed in 1985, the building’s powerful concrete construction gestured to the Paulista brutalism that Ruy Ohtake had learned as a student at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism—the same school where his son would study in the early 2000’s—while its curved balconies suggested the sumptuous forms and colors that defined his later work.

“I’ve been an architect since I was born,” says Rodrigo Ohtake, who merged his own small studio with his father’s firm in 2021, following Ruy’s death from cancer at age 83. “My family has been working in Brazilian culture for 60 years—we have a kind of a tradition,” he observes. “But we try to look to the future, not the past.”

That penchant for experimentation played a central role in the modular home that Ohtake built in 2023 for himself, his art-curator wife, and their three young children outside Ibiúna, a hill-country town southwest of São Paulo. Designed by Ohtake and manufactured by sysHaus, a producer of prefabricated homes, the 1,940-square-foot country residence comprises four 10-by-20-foot steel prisms, each with a different typology but all containing a bedroom. These are arranged like a pinwheel around a central void, which accommodates the open-plan living space. Sliding glass doors opening onto the surrounding forest and 33-foot-long steel beams (the maximum size sysHaus can use without support columns) define the edges of the communal volume at the building’s core. As in Brazil’s colonial terrace houses, Ohtake notes, “The void is where the house happens.”

To break with the orthogonal rigidity imposed by the prefabricated modules, Ohtake shielded the exposed corners of the bedroom units with freestanding, wavelike screens of blue perforated steel. This is almost an inversion of the house his father designed for his grandmother in 1968 and expanded through the decades as his aesthetic transformed. While the son uses curves to create privacy and blur his home’s strictly rational silhouette, the father leveraged the open floor plan enabled by the floating concrete-canopy roof—a typical feature of Paulista modernism—to insert rounded dividing walls painted in vivid primary colors.

The Ibiúna house is capped with an exuberant, amoebalike roof cut from orange steel. This shape, Ohtake acknowledges, was partly inspired by his favorite structure in São Paulo: Oscar Niemeyer’s Marquise do Ibirapuera, a covered pathway beneath a sinuous, white concrete-slab marquee that snakes between the trees in the city’s most important park, connecting buildings and offering shelter from the intense subtropical sun and rain. For insulation, Ohtake topped most of the roof with 6 inches of soil in a free-form planter bursting with grasses and hanging vines. A grassy ramp curls up one flank of the house to merge with the roof at the back. Embraced by the earth and practically erased from view, the home becomes a steel cave enlivened by the intrusions of the surrounding landscape. “When the wind blows, you almost feel the trees are inside the house—a lot of leaves come in, which I think is marvelous,” Ohtake enthuses. “I wanted to show that industrial materials can be in harmony with nature.”

The entire project served as a proof-of-concept for prefabrication in a country where, for the most part, Ohtake says, “We are still doing architecture as if we were building pyramids, brick by brick, when we should be building more like LEGO.” Despite pioneering architects like João Filgueiras Lima, better known as Lelé, who began developing ingenious modular construction systems in the 1960’s and continued innovating through the ’80’s, Ohtake believes most Brazilians still associate prefabrication with American-style cabinet construction introduced in the ’70’s. That flimsy, disposable approach held little appeal for families that regard their homes as patrimony for their children. “We can only prove that these houses are permanent by building them,” he asserts, something sysHaus will do when it starts shipping its first Ohtake-designed modular homes across the country later this year.

For Ohtake, modular-systems architecture is, above all, an extension of a generations-long inheritance of materializing a future that looks different from the past. That forward-looking attitude expresses itself in the Ibiúna house, of course, but even more powerfully in the way the family uses it. “I don’t have to worry about toys,” the architect reports. “The kids just go into nature to play with wood and leaves, stones and sand.” Educated to value rationality but raised to question its primacy, Ohtake worries over the future of a society that trains young people out of creativity in favor of more reliably profitable skills. “I’m trying to tell my children, ‘Use your sense of play, it will help you in your future,’ which is something I can say from experience,” he concludes. “The world is too serious. We should have more play.”

Inside This Modular Home In Brazil

OHTAKE: ANDREI DA SILVA; LEONARDO ROCHA; ISABELLA MARTINI; CARLA STELLA. SYSHAUS: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT AMÉRICA MÓVEIS: CLUB CHAIR (LIVING AREA), SOFA (TV AREA). ARTI MÓVEIS: ARM-CHAIR, COFFEE TABLES (LIVING AREA), SIDE TABLE (LIVING AREA, TV AREA). 31 MOBILIÁRIO: SLING CHAIR (LIVING AREA), CHAIR, STOOL (TV AREA). PUNTO E FILO: RUGS (LIVING AREA, TV AREA) TETO VINÍLICO: VINYL CEILING (BEDROOM). MEKAL: WORKSTATIONS (KITCHEN). THROUGHOUT JAPI: OUT-DOOR FURNITURE. TARKETT: VINYL FLOORING.