A house built for working, cooking, gardening and entertaining opens to the landscape while offering shelter from the summer sun

If you’re going to work from home, you want it to be a home in which you like working, and that’s exactly what these homeowners set out to create when they embarked on building their house in far northeastern New South Wales, Australia. With help from architects Sarah Aldridge and Jason Trisley of Space Studio, the couple created a home that would meet their needs for work, rest and play.

“Both clients carry out consultancy work from home, so a good home office space was an essential part of the brief,” Aldridge says. Their children live a distance away, and tend to visit infrequently but for longer periods, so it was important to the clients that they had a separate space for them. The guest bedroom has plenty of storage and its own en suite bathroom, and a refurbished onsite guest cottage is well used. The home office doubles as an additional guest space.

The owners are excellent cooks and gardeners and enjoy entertaining, so in addition to a kitchen and a butler’s kitchen, the architects designed a generous covered area next to the back door with gardening tool storage and a sink for washing vegetables picked from the garden.

Practitioners of organic architecture seek to connect houses more closely with their natural surroundings. Here’s how they do it

We know that our environments affect our moods, and that buildings play a major role in that, but how can we change the way we build our homes to help improve our sense of well-being?

There is growing evidence that suggests being cooped up in buildings is bad for our health and that having connections to the exterior environment has positive health outcomes. Studies have found that views of nature from the home provide a significant improvement in general well-being.

Improving the connection between the interior and the exterior of a building is the driving force behind the organic architecture movement started by Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900s. And that connection is integral to designs by contemporary organic architects. Take a closer look at how this style of architecture might work for you.

You can see the love of nature and organic shapes at first glance. Look more closely at this Wisconsin home and you’ll also see amazing flow

These homeowners are building the dream house of a lifetime, which takes time, patience and flexibility. Not just on their part, but on the part of their architect as well. It’s so fitting that they found architect Robert Oshatz, who rolls with his clients’ needs, letting the house evolve as they progress through the design process.

So far this unique lakeside home has taken two years to design and two and a half years to build, and that’s just phase one of construction. Designed to fit into the wooded slope along the shores of a Wisconsin lake, the organic architecture evolved from responding to its surroundings and the needs of the family, which was growing as the house went up. The result is a home that is continuous from room to room and from indoors to out.