15 Outdoor Pillows to Refresh Your Backyard Lounge

An entrepreneur and family with a passion for healthy living requested a large home on their dramatically sloping 2-acre site. They specifically wanted an informal layout that could be woven into the topography of the property. Wanting to enjoy as much of the site as possible, the client requested the inclusion of steps and landscape pathways to allow for access to more distant parts of the steep site. Situated on a promontory jutting into the canyon below, the hillside retreat boasts multiple vistas of the surrounding canyon and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Since covenants, conditions, and restrictions associated with the property allowed for only a single story above street level, many of the home’s rooms are located on a lower level which daylights onto the downslope side of the house. This modest massing arrangement allows for neighboring properties to see over the roof of the home. In three distinct locations, landscaped topography “fingers” heighten one’s awareness of the natural hillside. Bridges span over these fingers, enhancing and extending the natural graded areas deep into the heart of the home. The design solution offers new perspectives for experiencing the owner’s prized views while providing a glimpse of the topography as it stood before the house was set upon it. Meticulous craftsmanship and authentic building materials are recurring themes best exemplified by the widespread use of board-formed concrete walls, white oak shiplap wall cladding, and painted galvanized steel doors and windows. A datum of wall elevations was carefully laid out to align the joints of the seemingly random board-formed concrete with the adjacent wood boards that come in 3″, 4″, 5″, and 6″ widths. Floors, ceilings, steps, lighting, speakers, keypad controls, and outlets were all carefully placed so that no element ever interrupts a joint in the boards.

Known as “Immerso Glamping”, this alpine cabin, designed by Italian architects Fabio Vignolo and Francesca Turnaturi, is true to its name: it allows guests to go off the grid and reconnect with nature in an inventive way. While the prefabricated shelter is designed to be easily moveable, Immerso Glamping is currently located in the alpine village of Usseaux in Italy’s Piedmont region.

Fall is different things for different people. Some start to miss the warmth and sunshine of summer even this early into the season while others would have already started planning for the many festive days that we are eagerly awaiting. In a year when a raging global pandemic is still keeping many of us inside, […]

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This house features an elegant and functional design, with two well-distributed floors. The limitations of land…

Sited gently on the lower slope of a dramatic sixty foot high coastal bank and surrounded by miles of undeveloped Cape Cod National Seashore beaches and scrub pines is a warm, modern beach house that is more than just a place to enjoy uninterrupted ocean views and sea breezes. Our clients dreamed of a house that would work equally well as both a year-round family “camp” and also as a “thinking retreat” for collaborating with their colleagues. From the beginning of design it was critically important to us and to our clients – as well as the Town Conservation Commission and National Seashore representatives – that the house fit into its fragile site seamlessly. Our team responded with great care by designing the house to curve and shift softly with the natural topography and also by envisioning the new native and drought resistant landscaping growing back tight to the house as if both had always been there together. The main house is conceived of as a collage of overlapping, cantilevered planes and volumes that culminate in a large living / dining space defined by an asymmetrically arcing copper roof plane. Entry to the house is by way of a long ramp through what will in a few years be a thicket of native pines and bushes, then through curving cedar shingled planes. The inland side of the house is tucked into its shifting, sandy landscape and is comprised of cedar shingled planes that float above the ground and contain bedrooms, bathrooms, and the kitchen, and lower volumes of horizontal tongue and groove cedar boards that enclose bedrooms and a gathering space for teenage sons. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. Separated from the main house by a screen porch and contiguous deck, is a separate art / yoga / thinking studio that seemingly floats fourteen feet above the ground. Inside is a single large loft space as well as a full bath, and below is an open-air summer art studio and boat / beach toy storage, behind walls of wood slats and matching barn doors.