Easygoing style and a peaceful palette create a welcoming waterfront home for a family

Sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful thing. Michele Thornquist, development director at a Seattle-area private school, and her husband, John, a business owner in aeronautical engineering, fell in love with a Kitsap Peninsula beach, put an offer on a midcentury modern home there and hoped for the best. But when that home proved to have many unexpected issues, they rescinded their offer. This turned out to be a blessing, as a better house two doors away came up for sale a short time later.

“We heard the owners were considering selling this house,” says Michele. “It took some negotiating, but here we are, on the beach that we liked so much.”

Typically, a home has a layer that can be considered a base or foundation, and above that there are levels which can be designated as public and/or private living spaces. And for the most part, we know what to expect from those levels: wider on the bottom and narrower near the top, since that’s what physics and engineering tell us makes sense.

The BE House in Paredes, Portugal turns that expectation upside-down. Designed by Portuguese firm spaceworkers, the three-level home features what appears to be an impossible middle layer made entirely of glass. The glass level is actually smaller than the overhanging enclosed layer, making the house appear to be precariously stacked out of order.

Through history, houses have evolved from caves to lodges, from castles to mansions. And nowadays it seems like you can find an example of anything. Some people are forced to get creative because of restrictions – like small or unusual space – while others do so just because.

They may look fanciful, but cylinders can serve practical purposes in architectural designs

In the kit of parts of modern architecture, one finds plenty of boxes (especially glass ones) as well as gables and the occasional curve. But what about cylinders? Hearing of that form in regard to buildings probably brings to mind art deco architecture, a short-lived style that was popular in the early 20th century; it used rounded corners and cylinders to give the appearance of streamlined movement. Going further back in time, cylinders recall the turrets of medieval buildings and the grain silos of vernacular industrial buildings in America.

Nevertheless, cylinders have a place in architectural form making; they’re rare in modern and contemporary architecture but quite a statement when done successfully. This ideabook presents some cylinders from the outside and the inside.