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A Chilean Architect Quietly Built a House That Follows the Hill Instead of Fighting It

House 22, designed by Chilean studio Loft7 and completed in 2023, sits on a sloping coastal lot south of Punta de Lobos — a stretch of Chilean coastline known for dramatic surf and untouched native scrubland. The lot descends toward the northwest, and rather than resisting that gradient, the architecture follows it, letting the terrain pull the building naturally toward an uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean.

At 320 square meters, the residence is generous without being excessive. Loft7 structured the build using a combination of reinforced concrete and steel frames — a technical pairing that allows the house to hold its ground on a challenging slope while keeping the interior language warm and tactile. Exposed timber beams run through the living spaces, the dining area, and the kitchen, grounding each room in material honesty. There’s no attempt to disguise how the building is put together. That transparency is the design.

Designer: Loft7

What makes House 22 worth studying isn’t a single dramatic gesture — it’s restraint applied consistently. The interiors lean on wood, natural light, and sightlines that always resolve at the ocean. No surface fights for attention. The beam grid overhead becomes rhythm rather than decoration, and the open-plan social spaces feel like they’re orientated by the view rather than by a floor plan. Spaces breathe because the architecture got out of the way.

Pichilemu is famous in surfing circles, but architecturally it’s a place where the Chilean coast has quietly been producing some of the country’s most considered residential work. Loft7 fits that lineage — a studio that has built its reputation around sites where nature already has the upper hand. Their approach with Casa 22 trusts the land and the light, deploying materials that age well in a coastal climate and a massing that reads modestly from the outside while delivering on every expectation from within.

Photographed by Fabián Acuña, the project looks different at every hour of the day. Morning light hits the timber and fills the interiors with warmth; the Pacific turns silver in the afternoon. That relationship between material, orientation, and time of day is never accidental in good coastal architecture — and here it feels entirely intentional. House 22 isn’t trying to be the loudest house on the Chilean coast. It’s trying to be the most honest one. On both counts, Loft7 delivers.

The post A Chilean Architect Quietly Built a House That Follows the Hill Instead of Fighting It first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Inside the Log-and-Glass Home Olson Kundig Built for a Builder on Salt Spring Island

Salt Spring Island doesn’t need much convincing — it already has the cliffs, the meadows, and the trees. The name sounds more like a childhood storybook setting than an architectural statement — and that tension is exactly the point. Nestled amidst the trees and rugged cliffs of Salt Spring Island, BC, the Daisy Ranch is Olson Kundig’s most recent residential project, led by design principal Tom Kundig. It’s casual. It’s rugged. And it’s entirely, unapologetically itself.

The house sits at the edge of a sweeping meadow, anchored by a log structure that feels like it could have always been there. The primary move is a rugged glass box paired with a long, cantilevered roof that stretches over a generous deck — a roof that earns its keep through BC’s shifting seasons, offering shelter without closing anything off. What makes it work visually is the layering: large square-cut logs and glass soften the rust-colored patina of weathered steel cladding, giving the exterior a palette that feels earned rather than designed.

Designer: Olsun Kundig

The plan is organized along a clean linear axis, with two distinct volumes bisected by an eastern entry stairway. The front door is tucked under a generous overhang — a small but considered gesture that grounds the arrival sequence without dramatizing it. The northern volume, clad in wood and steel, handles the private program: a primary suite and additional bedrooms, with framed view corridors that offer deliberate glimpses of the landscape rather than full exposure. Privacy and connection, calibrated carefully.

Inside, the bathroom is where the project gets most personal. Widespread use of wood infuses the space with warmth, while a clawfoot tub set before corner windows underscores the home’s persistent connection to the landscape outside. It’s the kind of detail that feels borrowed from an older, more tactile way of building — which is precisely the intention.

The project was designed in close collaboration with the client, Patrick Powers, a builder and fabricator who also served as general contractor. That relationship left its mark. The house doesn’t feel like it was delivered to a site; it feels like it was made with the site, material decision by material decision.

As Kundig put it: “There’s a lineage at play in this project, a quiet innovation that comes from the shared DNA of materials and relationships.” The Daisy Ranch is the kind of project that doesn’t need to announce itself. It sits lightly on its land, opens wide to its meadow, and gets on with the business of being lived in.

The post Inside the Log-and-Glass Home Olson Kundig Built for a Builder on Salt Spring Island first appeared on Yanko Design.

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Studioninedots’ Light House Is a Vertical Amsterdam Home Built From Playfully Stacked Boxes

What does a home look like when you throw out the floor plan entirely? For Amsterdam-based firm Studioninedots, the answer is a tower of playfully stacked boxes, each one dedicated to a single moment in life, that rises above one of the Dutch capital’s newest neighborhoods. Completed in 2025, Light House sits on Centrumeiland, a newly developed artificial island district defined by its self-build culture and strong sustainability ambitions.

The project began with a simple brief from a couple with two children who wanted a home that would genuinely bring them together. Rather than anchoring daily life to the ground floor the way most houses do, Studioninedots dedicated each of the family’s key activities — eating, gathering, cooking, relaxing — to its own distinct volume, then arranged those volumes vertically into a single, tightly considered composition. The result is a 257-square-meter residence that feels less like a stacked building and more like a small vertical neighborhood.

Designer: Studioninedots

Movement through the home unfolds through a sequence of open passages and compressed zones, where shifts in scale produce entirely different spatial moods. Smaller, enclosed areas carve out space for focused, quieter activities, while larger voids open up visual connections across levels, dissolving any conventional sense of what is above and what is below. Hovering above the kitchen is a sheltered, secluded volume ideal for yoga or film watching, while the journey through the house culminates at the top in what the architects describe as a “holiday home” within the city. Flanked by arched ceiling-height glass openings, this 14-metre-high gathering room commands panoramic views across the IJmeer lake.

The facade does a lot of the design’s heavy lifting. A wall of square glass blocks wraps the front of the building, filtering natural light into the interior while abstracting the life inside, offering privacy without sacrificing the warmth of daylight. At night, the facade glows from within, giving the house an almost lantern-like presence on the street.

Sustainability is baked into the structure itself. Light House is built as a lightweight system using prefabricated timber components inside a steel frame, a circular and modular method that allows for flexibility, long-term adaptability, and ease of disassembly. The layout is not fixed either, as children grow and priorities shift, the home can be reconfigured to meet whatever the family needs next. Light House is a rare thing: a home that feels entirely personal yet completely considered, one where architecture quietly gets out of the way and lets life fill the space.

The post Studioninedots’ Light House Is a Vertical Amsterdam Home Built From Playfully Stacked Boxes first appeared on Yanko Design.

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