Modern & Contemporary

Home Homes Modern & Contemporary

It Looks Like A 200-Year-Old Crumbling Home, But Inside It’s A Different Story

We know not to judge a book by its cover, or in this case a home by its exterior. This 200-year-old stone house in Linescio, Switzerland certainly proves that better than most anything we’ve seen. Even as you walk around the outside and see the crumbling stone walls right in front of your face, you’d have a hard time believing it was recently renovated. That’s because it was only renovated on the inside.

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Buchner Bründler Architekten completed this unique restoration that basically involved building a home within a home. They left the exterior more or less untouched, and built a fresh interior shell using a minimalist design approach. While the outside still retains the rugged stones that made up the original walls, the inside now has fresh concrete surfaces and modern finishes throughout. Each concrete slab was carefully brought inside and assembled; tall wood shutters fold open to reveal the original window frames, a new bathtub was sunk into the concrete floor, and a single slab was used for the kitchen counter.

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Jaw-Dropping Views Await In This Stunning Copper-Clad Beach House

A breathtaking and vertigo-inducing 250 foot drop to the Pacific Ocean provides a daunting, yet beautiful backdrop for this modern beach house. The Buck Creek House, designed by California-based firm Fougeron Architecture, marries the sea with the surf through strategic openings that frame only the most jaw-dropping views.

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The unique aesthetic of the home’s exterior make a fleeting attempt to steal your attention from the crystal blue water, but do so in vein. The back end of the home is largely opaque for purposes of privacy, and clad in shimmering copper panels that change throughout the day depending on the light. However, there is no containing the sea-side facade, which opens completely to pier over the looming shear cliff.

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The interiors are clean, sleek, and do just what only what’s necessary to supplement the ocean views. High vaulted ceilings expand the spaces vertically, allowing light and air to flow through the home with elegant determination. This spectacular beach house has three bedrooms, a cantilevered master suite and a living room that opens to an adjacent exterior courtyard.

You Won’t Believe What One Woman Turned This Old Garage Into

Take a good look at this garage and think about what you see. Pretty ordinary, run-of-the-mill, single door car hole, right?

00168152 Wrong.

Contained within that beat up, outdated, poorly painted relic of a structure lives one woman’s inspiration, and the potential to become her dream home. What she transformed that garage into is nothing short of incredible. Take a look.
00168162 Meet Michelle de la Vega of Seattle, Washington. Artist, designer, welder and visionary. Michelle put her creative inclinations to extraordinary use when designing and building this 250 square foot sanctuary.00168172 Many home-grown renovations have a tendency to look…well…amateur. Not this abode. The details and finishes were planned with meticulous and professional method, resulting in a clean, well-organized space.00168182 00168192 It may not look like your traditional kitchen, but it’s full of character and charm. The tiny home boasts a full bathroom, living/dining space, and lofted bed area in addition to this modest kitchen. Not bad for 250 SF.00168202 The fireplace is a central feature and adds a touch of rustic flair, accompanied by Michelle’s own art work!0016821200168232 The bathroom is highlighted by a large soaking tub and an abundance of natural light thanks to the appropriately placed skylight above.00168242 00168252Michelle certainly has a knack for finding beauty in discarded items. After transforming a decrepit shell of an old garage into this incredible home, she filled it with up-cycled furniture like this weathered storage locker.

If you’d like to know more about Michelle and her artwork, follow this link: Michelle de la Vega.

You Won’t Believe What This Awesome Brewery Used To Be

As part of a massive neighborhood revitalization project in the Güemes district in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, this funky, open concept brewery was crafted from the shell of an old, broken down police station. What was once home to handcuffed criminals, on-duty patrolmen and stale donuts now serves locals cold, crisp lagers and plenty of interesting sights. The rennovation was led by Guillermo Cacciavillani, cofounder and creative director of Bar Makers.

In the architect’s words: “To transform the neighborhood, making it an engaging place, a living history, is the spirit that is revitalizing an area that for many years was marginalized in the urban scene of the city.” What better what to inject life and vigor into a neglected area than to provide a vibrant social gathering space as functionally appropriate and majestically pulled off as the Capitan Central Brewery?

captn brewery8The beauty in the juxtaposition of old against new is immediately noticeable, giving new life to an old shell.captn brewery1 Concrete benches and planters are used to reinforce the starkness of new material that plays on what was once there.captn brewery2 captn brewery3 Flashes of bright red punctuate interior circulation, both of people and the brewery equipment systems. captn brewery4 captn brewery5 A wall of delicately detailed windows open the space to an outdoor court, providing the interior with ample natural light.
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The courtyard sits adjacent to the massive concrete entry. The grand industrial procession pays homage to the police station that once stood here.

An Unreal Renovation Has This Home In The Record Books

It’s not quite as dramatic as a Medieval drawbridge, but it just might be as massive. This ultra-modern home in Antwerp, Belgium is host to the world’s largest set of fully glazed pivot doors. Local architecture firm Sculpt IT worked with window manufacturers and engineers to realize the one-of-a-kind feature, which are impressive not only in size, but in contemporary design as well.

The doors are part of a fully glazed facade that opens the entire side of the home to an exterior courtyard. When the pivot doors are swung open, the kitchen area naturally spills out across the seamless transition of the monolithic concrete slab.

The installation of the doors was part of a holistic renovation of an existing home. The entire house was gutted and re-fitted with modern finishes, properly organized spaces, and one hell of a center piece.

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A Green Courtyard Grows Inside This Renovated Home

Architect Andrew Maynard saw endless potential when he looked at a ragged old apartment in Seddon, Australia. He saw light and air, ground and sky, inside and out. He saw an opportunity to create something truly unique: a home that literally blurs the lines between shelter and landscape.

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The inside out home makes one emphatic, yet simple architectural expression in the form of an extruded space topped with a symmetrical gabled roof. The result is a modern play on traditional vernacular and presents a blank canvas that is then painted with open walls, neck pinching skylights and greenery that seeps in from the surrounding gardens.

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It must feel nice to take a hot bath with the sun shining down and nature surrounding you.

Standalone-tub-offers-the-outdoor-bath-experienceThe architects have dubbed the project as “deliberately incomplete,” which is made clear by the ruin-like aesthetic of unfinished walls and roofs. Of course, certain areas of the home can still be closed off from the elements, but a large section of the living space is only semi-conditioned, leaving it up to mother nature to control the interior comfort.

 

Container Madness!! Massive House Built With 31 Shipping Containers

Few words come to mind that would appropriately describe a home that was built with an astounding 31 recycled shipping containers, but I’ll do my best. Australian architects ZeiglerBuild shocked the architecture community when they conceived this grandiose experiment, evoking the curiosity of a child who was just given Legos for the first time. The home is spread out over three interlocking stories and features a salt water pool and some impressive exterior graffiti art.

The exterior of the home was treated as if they containers had been left in the open to the devices of urban hoodlummery and vandalism. It’s a unique approach that in an odd paradoxical way calms the massive scale of the building. A structure of this size has every opportunity to appear as a wart on the landscape no matter where it is situated, but the celebration of the container’s facade gives the building an innate sense of place. The playful juxtaposition of new and old is evident everywhere, cohesively binding the interior to the exterior.

Diamond Shaped Dune House Appears Sunken Into The Earth

The Dune house looks half-buried in the earth, a striking sight on the island of Terschelling in the Netherlands. The unusual design comes courtesy of Marc Koehler Architects, and its diamond shape delivers a most unsual perspective of the surrounding plains and the distant North Sea.

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Inside the home you’ll find a layout that mimicks the name, creating a sense of wandering a dune as you traverse the various levels. Regardless of where you are, plenty of windows illuminate the shapes and angles inside with a dazzling light. A variety of sustainable elements went into the build, including prefab wood, solar panels, and a biomass fireplace.

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Photography: Marc Koehler Architects

Rare Sighting: A PreFab Home That Looks Natural In The Wild

It’s often difficult for a pre-fabricated home or building to have a cohesive relationship with its building site. Even if great care is taken to orient the factory-built structure to best highlight the important views, topography, etc., they can have a tendency to feel tacked on rather than integrated with their surroundings.

This particular project by German industrial designers Patrick Frey and Bjorn Gotte manages to come off the shelf and into the wild with a soft and subtle nuance not often seen in pre-fab.

The Summerhaus Piu PreFab Vacation Home boasts a clean, warm material palette that quickly associates it with its surrounding environment. There is some flexibility in the design and manufacturing process that allows materials to be applied smartly based on native and available materials. This gives the home a closer connection to its final resting place regardless of where that might be. Large openings bring in light, and the home is pointed out towards the best, most scenic views.

The Amazing “Ridge House” Glows Like A Lighthouse

Cape Cod is home to this two-story vacation home that breathes contemporary architectural life into age-old formal expressions. Massachusetts based Hammer Architects designed a house – aptly named the “Ridge House,” – that uses a towering gabled roof form to echo the traditional craftsman look, while juxtaposing a see-through interior that screams modernity. The entire second floor, which contains the main living spaces, is transparent, making the exposed roof appear as if it’s floating above almost completely unsupported. This effect is especially noticeable at night, when the interior glows like a Chinese lantern.

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Originally, the client wished for a single-story floor plan, but the architects convinced them to stack the spaces to increase the dramatic effect of the roof. I’d say it worked. Traditional materials such as wood shingles are applied in new and interesting ways, again paying homage to historic building commonalities. Bedroom and service spaces occupy the lower floor, allowing the living, kitchen and dining spaces to sit above and enjoy sprawling views of the lush countryside.

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The home is, arguably, best seen at night, when the massive glazed openings glow like a distant lighthouse. Many of which pepper the coast of Cape Cod.

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An exterior deck hangs off the main living floor, allowing the interior spaces to spill out over the adjacent hill and providing an even more spectacular view of the surrounding countryside.

North-Pamet-Ridge-House-by-Hammer-3 Everything on the interior is exposed. Here is a look at the open kitchen that looks directly at the dining and living areas. The floor plan is narrow, but efficient and plentiful.

North-Pamet-Ridge-House-by-Hammer-6 Another look at the second floor. The interior partition wall is a post-modern play on traditional architecture style.

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