Latest news with #Dwell.com
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
This Rooftop Greenhouse Is the Ideal Work-From-Home Space for a Plant-Loving Uruguayan Couple
Amalia Branaa Donner and Uzi Sabah renovated a midcentury house to embrace nature—with the help of an architect they found in Dwell. When Amalia Branaa Donner and Uzi Sabah moved from Los Angeles to Montevideo, Uruguay, their hometown, at the height of the pandemic, they had to find a rental quickly. They had moved back because Covid was less prevalent there, and they wanted to reconnect with family. A brisk search led them to a house in a residential area that had been off their radar: Punta Gorda, a neighborhood built on a low hill overlooking Montevideo's riverside promenade, known as La Rambla. The couple enjoyed staying there and, during one of their afternoon walks, noticed a midcentury house that was uninhabited—and for sale. It had a simple, rectangular exterior, and because it was built on a slope, the back of the property had views over the neighborhood's rooftops and treetops and all the way down to the Rio de la Plata in the distance. It also had a huge garage occupying the entire ground level, which they immediately envisioned as a living space. They decided to buy it, but they needed an architect to help them transform the two-story structure, built in 1950 and never renovated, into a contemporary family home for themselves and their two children, now 10 and 8. Amalia and Uzi are both creatives—she's a graphic designer, he's a filmmaker and an artist—so they wanted to work with someone willing to push the boundaries of convention. "Everything was the way it had been designed in the '50s—the closets, kitchen, bathrooms all were from that era, and small." —Uzi Sabah, resident See the full story on This Rooftop Greenhouse Is the Ideal Work-From-Home Space for a Plant-Loving Uruguayan CoupleRelated stories: Budget Breakdown: After a $322K Revamp, an Australian Beach House Fends Off Flooding A Remote Island Retreat's Hefty Wooden Doorknob Hints at Its Highly Custom Interiors There's No Front Door at This Family Home Outside Barcelona
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Yahoo
Budget Breakdown: After a $322K Revamp, an Australian Beach House Fends Off Flooding
Nigel Chouri and Crick King bought the tattered '50s property for $911K and introduced water-resistant features, a Spanish-style plaza, and a dreamy garden ADU. I knock on the front door of Cal Somni, but there's no answer. It feels like the kind of place where you don't knock anyway. You just arrive. There's a car in the driveway indicating someone's presence so I wander along a redbrick path toward a garden pavilion, its doors wide open with quiet invitation. Beyond the pavilion, the murmur of a creek calls my attention into the bushland where Nigel Chouri and Crick King emerge barefoot, fresh from a swim. At Cal Somni ("place of dreams" in Catalan), water is a constant companion. There's a tidal creek behind, the Tweed River across the road, and the Pacific Ocean roaring just beyond the mangroves against the shores of Dreamtime Beach. And with the water table just 28 inches below the surface, Cal Somni doesn't just feel like it's floating—it practically is. Nigel and Crick purchased the 1950s beach shack online in 2020 from their apartment in Barcelona, where they had lived for the past 20 years designing hotels, hospitality venues, and culinary experiences. They wanted to live closer to family, and they decided on Fingal Head, a narrow peninsula in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia. But the couple soon realized that Fingal Head was too remote, too quiet compared to the bustling social rhythms they'd grown used to in Spain. See the full story on Budget Breakdown: After a $322K Revamp, an Australian Beach House Fends Off FloodingRelated stories: A Remote Island Retreat's Hefty Wooden Doorknob Hints at Its Highly Custom Interiors There's No Front Door at This Family Home Outside Barcelona A Backyard in Norway Gets a Ship-Shaped Addition
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
A Designer Builds a Home With a Rooftop Hot Tub on His Parents' Ranch in Guatemala
Dwell 24 alum Manny Rionda fled from the city to his family's finca during Covid lockdowns and devised a home for himself there where he could live among the trees. In the spring of 2020, when Covid lockdowns began, Manny Rionda retreated from his home in Guatemala City to his family's finca, or ranch, in the highlands 35 miles to the west. At first he lived with his parents in their two-bedroom 1960s house on the mountainous estate, but he fell in love with country living and decided to stay. His parents granted him some space on the working farm to build his own home, and Manny, a fashion photographer and furniture designer, got to work on his first architectural project. Casa Zanate, as Manny named it, doesn't immediately reveal itself. Manny minimized its footprint to avoid damaging the coffee, macadamia, and guava trees on the site, and the home—a 1,480-square-foot, single-story box—is shrouded in greenery. "The trees here are sacred, since it takes almost a decade for them to flower," Manny says. Cantilevered concrete steps draw visitors in and lead to a floating deck that wraps around the home's flat front facade, connecting to a spacious side terrace hovering among the leaves. To meet the $80,000 to $100,000 U.S. dollars budget, Manny had the walls built with cinder block and coated in chukum, a low-cost material made of tree resin mixed with limestone. "It was used by the Maya, and it can be easily colored, though we left it in its natural shade," he says. "It's waterproof, heavy duty, and I don't have to paint the exterior." After the home's first rainy season, the walls began to stain naturally, blending with the landscape. See the full story on A Designer Builds a Home With a Rooftop Hot Tub on His Parents' Ranch in GuatemalaRelated stories: This Rooftop Greenhouse Is the Ideal Work-From-Home Space for a Plant-Loving Uruguayan Couple Budget Breakdown: After a $322K Revamp, an Australian Beach House Fends Off Flooding A Remote Island Retreat's Hefty Wooden Doorknob Hints at Its Highly Custom Interiors
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This $3.9M Midcentury on the San Francisco Bay Comes With a Boat Dock
Designed by Jack Finnegan, the waterfront home has a brand-new kitchen, restored floors and ceilings, and Japanese-inspired gardens. Location: 205 Martinique Avenue, Belvedere Tiburon, California Price: $3,850,000 Year Built: 1959 Architect: Jack Finnegan Renovation Date: 2025 Renovation Designer: Suprstructur Landscape Architect: Margot Jacobs Footprint: 2,808 square feet (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths) Lot Size: 0.23 Acres From the Agent: "Designed in 1959 by Jack Finnegan AIA, this crisp midcentury-modern home is positioned at the head of a canal with distant views. The house has been comprehensively restored over four years with contemporary landscaping. The low-slung, delta-roofed house was designed at the end of the 1950s and was resolutely modern and avant-garde for its time. Sited at the head of a canal, the 2,808-square-foot house has extensive water views and its own private, deepwater boat dock. It's been carefully restored over the past four years by Suprstructur, and new design elements have been thoughtfully incorporated into the building fabric so that they appear to have always been part of the architecture." See the full story on This $3.9M Midcentury on the San Francisco Bay Comes With a Boat DockRelated stories: This Wild $1.3M North Carolina Home Is Buried Beneath the Earth This $1.1M "Floating" Houston Home Was Inspired by a Nearby Freeway An Icon of Midcentury Glass Architecture Pops Up on the Market in Briarcliff Manor for $2.9M
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
This $120K Tiny Home Is a Tea House on Wheels
Tiny House Japan's units are designed like saunas—with plenty of cedar to withstand heat and steam. Welcome to Tiny Home Profiles, an interview series with people pushing the limits of living small. From space-saving hacks to flexible floor plans, here's what they say makes for the best tiny homes on the planet. Know of a builder we should talk to? Reach out. Haruhiko Tagami had been living in his 1960s Eriba Puck when he came across a unique problem: however timeless the travel tailer was, it was not equipped for putting the kettle on. "During winter months, boiling water would result in wall-to-wall condensation, and without absorbent tape, even the sleeping bag would get wet," Tagami recalls. "Mold gradually grew and the ceiling turned black, and the room began to smell like mold." Coming from a family that had owned a sawmill, and having once apprenticed as a carpenter, obtaining a second-class architect license (a credential needed in Japan to design smaller buildings), Tagami was well qualified to build a trailer that better suited his needs. "I thought I might be able to build a comfortable wooden one," he tells us. "So I bought a used bike trailer and built a Usonia-style home out of Japanese cedar." That was in 2014. Since, his company, Tiny House Japan, has made several designs that follow Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonia principles—from a deployable emergency shelter, to an itinerant tea house, to a stationary home made up of two linked modules—that each aims to make the most of a five-and-a-half meter trailer bed. Here, Tagami shares the philosophy behind his work, a few of his past projects, and his latest build that's ready for tea-making: the Triangular Roof House. How did you decide to live in and build tiny homes? My partner and I have sensitivities to sound and pesticides and have lived in and out of various places. Because of these experiences, it was reasonable for us to have a house that we could move around in, rather than live in one place. From a production standpoint, it was also rational that we could build homes for distant clients in our factory. See the full story on This $120K Tiny Home Is a Tea House on WheelsRelated stories: Meet the Emerging Designers From 2025 ICFF's Launch Pad at WANTED These Midcentury Reissues Are Crafted to Be True Collector's Items Two Dwell Staffers Debate the Best of Salone del Mobile
