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Project Details:

Location: Vancouver, Canada

Footprint: 4,000 square feet

Architect: D’Arcy Jones Architects / @darcyjonesarchitects

Builder: NRT Development

Structural Engineer: Aspect Structural Engineers

Envelope Engineer: CSA Building Sciences Western

Photographer: Sama Jim Canzian / @silentsama

From the Architect: “The 3789 Redo carefully restored and strengthened a 115-year-old house, undoing many odd additions and awkward previous alterations. The building was originally a rooming house before transitioning to a community hospital in Vancouver’s Riley Park when the area was still surrounded by farmland on the city’s edge.

“The dilapidated house was disconnected and lifted from its existing crumbling base, allowing a new reinforced concrete foundation to be built underneath. After it was lowered, the existing wood-framed structure was retained and seismically reinforced with an exposed steel frame and bent steel stair. The steel structure’s apparent indifference to interior spaces and spatial demarcations results from the existing house’s joists and beam locations. Preserving them in place meant the steel was not always in ideal locations. Still, this strategy highlights that the project is a renovation and shows where the interior walls used to be, so the house’s original plan and proportions live on like a map on the ceiling. A new central stair of the same steel was rebuilt in the exact location as the original, modernizing the symmetry and planning of this historic building. Instead of feeling industrial, the steel gives the interior a more casual character than the exterior suggests.

“Modern tray ceilings further reinterpret and abstract the moldings of the house’s past. Two existing bay windows were replaced as pure glass vitrines with no mullions or operable fresh air windows. These vitrines were shaped into two cozy living room window seats. To bring fresh air into these nooks and every bedroom on the floor above, mini operable screened ‘doors’ act as the house’s fresh air vents. The small ‘doors’ are clad with cedar shingles like the building’s exterior. Opening and closing, they flap like fish scales, showing off the residents’ activity on the inside.

“A basement with a suite for an aging parent and an attic with an open office space sandwich the two main living floors. In the basement, lowered grades in a playroom and the suite’s living areas bring in as much natural light as the floors above. A soundproof attic suits one of the client’s night-owl work schedules. This office opens onto a roof deck with a city view hidden within the existing house’s hipped roof and cornice.

“Spindle railings and an oversize pivoting gate at the exterior have a modern feel in galvanized steel. A custom angular gutter transforms the roof into an idealized and abstract shape, emphasizing faithfully restored rafter tail soffit brackets. Even though the doors and windows are still located where they used to be, the old building is given new relevance and stature through refinement, exaggeration, and modern detailing.”

The air shifts on the narrow, winding road from El Limón to Playa Estillero, growing richer and slightly earthier with the smell of damp soil and sun-warmed wood. All is quiet as we arrive in this coastal enclave on the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Peninsula, except for the sounds of palm trees swaying lazily in the ocean breeze, construction in the distance, and rhythmic calls from roosters, woodpeckers, and frogs.

Tucked behind a veil of fruit trees and tropical plants is a kit building, originally imported from Brazil in 2003, that was once a reception center for a tight-knit sailor’s club before it was converted into a private home. The three-bedroom beachside cottage has more recently been revamped by Jennifer and Kenard Bunkley of Queens, New York, to serve as a getaway for themselves, their three children, and their relatives—including Jennifer’s mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Santo Domingo—as well as the occasional short-term guest.

Before: Kitchen

“We tried to utilize the resources here as much as we could, so most of the things in the house are handmade.”

—Jennifer Bunkley, designer and resident

After: Kitchen

“This is what I do,” Mike Gordon deadpans. “I travel around the country and sit in things.”

We’re touring his new home studio in a serious-looking modern building, but this remark reflects the sense of humor that pervades his decades-long career and his space. Mike is best known as the bassist for Phish, the iconic jam band that’s ruled festival grounds since the 1990s with shows that incorporate in-jokes and elaborate gags for their devoted fans. He also has a prolific solo career on top of that. Considering his packed schedule of touring and recording, it’s hard to believe that he has much time to sit.

But Mike is indeed a big sitter. During the design process for this 3,175-square-foot recording studio and living space on the grounds of his home in northern Vermont, Mike was far from the aloof celeb directing a team from a distance and was very hands-on (or butt-on, as the case may be). He estimates that he sat on a thousand sofas over two years when looking for one for the studio, spending a few hours a day testing them out between workouts and sound checks—and then there were the bathtubs. “He sat in so many tubs,” Brooke Michelsen, the interior designer for the space, tells me. “Like, so many tubs.”

“Mike’s an architecture buff,” says Brian Mac, principal architect at Vermont firm Birdseye, which designed and built the structure. “He loves design.”

As we sit in the glass-walled recording studio overlooking Lake Champlain, Mike says that he “would rather design stuff than write songs,” but he quickly walks that back. “I mean I have to be careful because I am so into aesthetics and space.” With such a packed schedule, design could be a distraction, but it’s been one of his lifelong preoccupations.

“I’ve been dreaming about creating places to hang out in and to work in since I was a kid,” he tells me. In high school he built a secret cabin in the woods with his friends, and he installed a hanging platform in his teenage bedroom with a ring of recording equipment that sounds more like an art installation than typical home decor.

It’s a late March afternoon, and the mountains of Japan are awakening to spring as Rob Tull dozes in his living room. The soft-spoken Englishman hails from a small town on Great Britain’s southern coast, and after living abroad for nearly three decades, he has finally found a place to put down permanent roots with his wife, Junko, who is originally from Okayama.

The home, with its sprawling glass surfaces and sharp angles, could feel out of place this deep in the woods, but nature doesn’t seem to mind it. A pack of wild macaques arrives to clamber over heaps of firewood, and their cries enter the house via an open kitchen window. The monkeys can see Rob and his family going about their daily life indoors, but they remain unfazed.

This house is a besso, a Japanese term for a countryside vacation home. Although Rob and Junko would like to eventually live here full-time, they are currently tied to Tokyo because of their work in finance. They escape a couple times a month with their daughter to Karuizawa, a mountainous enclave in Nagano Prefecture, about an hour northwest of the city by bullet train. “The location is just too convenient,” Rob says. “We were won over by the practicality of it.” Most Karuizawa besso are uninspired prefab cubes or stereotypes of American log cabins, but the couple knew they wanted something different.

They found their architect, Rei Mitsui, in a uniquely Japanese way. Junko met him at a formal tea ceremony, and they bonded over their love for traditional culture and aesthetics. A former associate of Shigeru Ban, Mitsui has designed projects ranging from traditional sukiya tearooms to minimalist homes.

Rob remembers seeing Mitsui’s design concept for the first time. “Wow, that’s different,” he said, semi-speechless after years of expecting to retire in a traditional kominka farmhouse. Still, it felt right. Mitsui was given free rein to let his imagination run wild, and he delivered a 1,085-square-foot cabin with two multilevel wings connected by a living space.

In a historic neighborhood in Kyoto’s Nakagyō Ward, structures elbow up against one another, including carpentry shops, centuries-old family pickle stores, and traditional machiya townhouses, for which the city is renowned. One such home stands out with its freshly restored wood exterior and an artwork at the entrance that hints at what’s now inside: a one-bed accommodation with a rotating photography library and gallery.

The house, known as 834 Mibu—a combination of the land lot number and an abbreviation of the area’s name, Mibugoshonouchicho—was renovated by photographer Dominick Sheldon and set designer Whitney Hellesen. The couple, whose primary residence is in California, had wanted to create a space to exhibit photographic works and books and support other creatives. They initially imagined their concept taking shape on property they owned near Palm Desert but, after realizing it would be too costly, shifted to Kyoto, a city that they had become enamored of while honeymooning there in 2017. “We liked the idea of doing it in Japan because of the country’s dedication to photography and craft,” says Dominick.

I started writing about residential design just a few months before Dwell published its first issue, and I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go in the last quarter century. Tuscan kitchens gave way to farmhouse kitchens; an interior furnished like a Belgian monastery would be a cottagecore fantasy today; formal dining rooms have become home offices. Even movements that once seemed unstoppably American, like the increasing footprint of the average new house, have revealed themselves to be conditional.

The desire for glass is another one of those unwavering patterns in modern home design that turns out to be less than gospel. Glass houses aren’t as covetable as they used to be, and you don’t have to simply take my word for it. This is a trend you can find in Dwell’s archive. The low-slung, see-through volumes that the magazine championed at its launch—the antidote to Y2K McMansions—have since been replaced by color-drenched interiors, fluted millwork, and terrazzo surfaces.

Unlike building size, which cycles up and down according to cost, the decline of glass houses isn’t so easy to explain. I’ve noticed their ebbing popularity since before the pandemic—and certainly after, too, when breakdowns in the supply chain caused the price of windows and glass doors to skyrocket. Are homebuyers not interested in the vibe glass houses are selling? Or is there something larger at play?

How did we get here?

Perhaps we should pan back for more perspective: One day in 1775, Hendrick Martin walked his grown son Gottlieb to the edge of their Hudson Valley farm for a hard talk. Although Hendrick had expanded the family home at the start of the decade, there was only so much room for his new grandchildren. He paced off a lot bordering the old post road for Gottlieb to “swarm for yourself.” The following year, Gottlieb fashioned a 24-by-42-foot building from rubble and hand-hewn timber with help from his battle brothers in the Continental Army. About a century after that, Gottlieb’s grandson Edward punched windows into the north- and south-facing walls, built a generously fenestrated wing behind the stone volume, and added a south-facing conservatory to the new annex.

Welcome to the house I share with my husband, Rick, which I would also call a case study in Americans’ relationship with glass. Edward’s renovations represented a national appetite for the stuff, as well as its promise: more daylight, better views.

A railroad engineer and land speculator, Edward had the means to be an early adopter, and all those windows ranked high among hot new tech. Architectural glass was an expensive, mouth-blown import when Edward’s grandfather Gottlieb was alive, and his windows would have been filled with milky discs of crown glass. Edward sourced wavy sheets of cylinder-blown glass for his house additions with an enthusiasm that finance bros might feel for pivoting glass doors and disappearing walls today. Industry’s march toward today’s huge expanses of barely there glass includes several milestones in the meantime, such as the introduction of plate glass and float glass in 1902 and 1959.

These inventions might have been achieved less slowly were it not for the architecture that stoked a desire for sleek indoor-outdoor connectivity. Think the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, the Barcelona Pavilion, or the Maison de Verre. But for American homeowners, nothing ignited interest like Philip Johnson’s Glass House. When Johnson completed the Glass House in 1949, Architectural Forum told trade readers that the building was instantly epochal: “The industrial age explored working with Nature; the present age explores living with it.” Meanwhile, Life magazine proclaimed the residence “one big room completely surrounded by scenery” to its five million subscribers. For voyeuristic flourish it added, “From his fireside a storm is exciting, new snow a lovely miracle.”

The desire for glass is another unwavering pattern in modern home design that turns out to be less than gospel.

Both popular and professional camps acknowledged that the New Canaan, Connecticut, residence had its faults as well. “Certainly this is a very special house…but of little use to a typical American family,” New York Times home editor Mary Roche wrote of its lack of privacy. Forum admitted that Johnson’s achievements were more symbolic than functional—and advised the archetypal family to spend most of its time in the adjacent, nearly windowless Brick House that the architect had completed simultaneously.

Perhaps because the acclaim was measured, this first golden age of glass houses didn’t last long. Houston-based architect Troy Schaum, who designed a Shenandoah Valley house featured in these pages two years ago, cites 1962 as a turning point. That’s when Robert Venturi began building a house for his mother that Schaum calls “a kind of response to the functional prowess that architects were demonstrating with the Miesian dematerialization. Postmodernism followed on Venturi’s thoughts about the frontality and image of a building.”

The pendulum swings twice

The glass house returned to vogue three decades later. Sure, up-and-coming tastemakers had rediscovered midcentury design as an antidote to PoMo. Makers of architectural glass had also worked out its insulation, acoustical, and engineering kinks, making it possible to inhabit a cloche as luxurious in comfort as in appearance. In 2013, architects Arjun Desai and Katherine Chia revealed the potential for utmost comfort when their eponymous studio completed a 21st-century Farnsworth House not far from Rick and me. Called the LM Guest House, this homage to the Mies van der Rohe–designed residence—after which Johnson modeled his own project—resolved the performance blind spots of yore with triple-glazed float glass, geothermal heating and cooling, and motorized shades, among other things. It’s also not a fishbowl, thanks to discreet siting on 365 rolling acres.

It sounds like the best of all worlds, so why haven’t LMs proliferated across the contemporary landscape? Chia says she still fields plenty of requests for exquisite glass boxes but often redirects clients to other options. That’s in part because sustainable building has become so mainstream. “LM abides by an older energy code, and nowadays it’s much more restrictive,” she tells me. “To do an all-glass house in California is pretty tough, and other states are following suit.” I share this feedback with Schaum, who seconds the observation. Making a glass house has “only gotten more complex in the way the facade has to perform,” he says.

In addition to better energy performance, architects have reasons to envision a life with more opacity. Leigh Salem, founding partner at Brooklyn- and Jackson, Wyoming–based Post Company, says, “We’re thinking about spaces that clients can grow into and that their kids and grandkids inhabit.” That kind of future-proofing is easier to achieve by “cutting a hole into a wood-stud wall” than by modifying a highly engineered glass house. Salem adds that homeowners-to-be are more easily steered away from Farnsworth and Glass House tributes than ever, too. “People are less interested in exposure and more interested in privacy, even rejecting the open floor plan,” he notes.

There’s no guaranteed rule for placing windows and doors in this era of judiciousness. The largest expanses of glass may be reserved typically for living and dining rooms, since passersby likely won’t catch you dancing in your undies in these spaces. A generous east-facing kitchen window also can be typical, to suffuse morning routines in daylight. But all kinds of exceptions apply to both rules of thumb: new construction versus renovation, a better vista elsewhere, nosy neighbors, a desire to break convention.

Back at the Martin homestead, exceptions rule. Over the last five years and counting, Rick and I have been reconstructing the building with a decent amount of historical fidelity. Gottlieb’s squattish stone cottage looks and feels much as Edward left it, while Edward’s wing is slightly rearranged inside and contains the up-to-date systems that neither patriarch could have imagined. Meanwhile, instead of resurrecting the conservatory, which may have disappeared at some point before the Depression, we transformed a corner of the back porch into our own glass box: double-glazed for decent performance, muntined for historical sensitivity, and sheathed inside with wood blinds for some extra privacy from the raised ranch next door. Like the homeowners before us and probably like the ones who will follow, Rick and I crave sunshine and views, and we’ve figured out a way to suit that aspiration to this site and our budget, as well as to the community and moment we occupy. And whether you’re an architect or a homeowner, a devotee of glass boxes or private hideaways, aren’t we all looking for a perfect fit?

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Head back to the July/August 2025 issue homepage

When browsing the local shops on your vacation for souvenirs this year, put down the magnets, set aside the ceramics, and make some room for glass. There are so many different glass traditions that are iconic because of where they’re from that it’s hard to pick which ones to highlight, but we chose four from around the world that have influenced design far outside their origins. From the teahouses of Morocco to the bustling markets of China, there’s glassware for every trip. And if the only travel you’re doing this summer is from the comfort of your backyard, we found some contemporary interpretations of each tradition.

Moroccan Beldi Glass

In Morocco, tea is more than just a drink—it’s a physical representation of hospitality. And often, the refreshing mint tea comes in small cups made of imperfect recycled material known as beldi glass. Traditionally made from things like beer or wine bottles in a process that has been more or less the same since the 1940s, beldi glasses are characterized by their small size and conical shape, as well as color. Although there are many examples of gilded beldi glasses and carafes out there, the traditional grass-green hue is instantly recognizable.

If Marrakech isn’t on your list this year, don’t fret—there are plenty of contemporary interpretations that we think evoke the tradition and won’t require a passport. Kickie Chudikova’s Danube Carafe comes with a matching cup that echoes the shape of traditional beldi glass and would work beautifully on a bedside table. And if you truly want the real deal, Verve Culture’s set, in the fetching green derived from recycled Heineken bottles, is just the ticket.

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

Gio Ponti, a designer, a professor, the founder of the seminal design magazine Domus, and a mentor to other creatives, is best known for how he shaped a new form of Italian design in the mid-20th century. He played with color, form, and function in a way that spoke to his country’s aesthetic past, present, and future. But he also created cruise ship interiors, cliffside hotels, and glamorous train cars, along the way shaping a distinct vision of stylish leisure.

A Hotel “Village” in the Woods

In 1938, Ponti worked with Austrian architect and cultural theorist Bernard Rudofsky, also a Domus staffer, to design a “hotel in the woods” built on the rocky slopes of Monte Solaro on the Italian island Capri. They planned for a series of individual rooms, or “cells,” connected by winding paths that served as corridors. The design utilized natural materials and fluid lines to blend in with the property’s existing mature trees, with each room getting expansive windows positioned to bring the outdoors inside. 

Ponti described it as creating a place for people “to lead the Capri lifestyle,” one in which visitors, for the duration of their stays, could become Caprese, staying both on the island and within it. While the project was never realized, Ponti and Rudofsky’s ideas inspired seaside villas across the country and helped conceive a new style of tourism in which the character of the landscape was as important as the architecture on it.

Last autumn, the outdoor kitchen at New York City’s Bruckner Mott Haven Garden—a community space in the South Bronx located between an elevated highway, industrial buildings, and a six-story apartment building—made its debut.

From a tall, column-like redbrick hearth, Natalia Méndez, a cofounder of the nearby Oaxacan restaurant La Morada, grilled fresh corn over an open fire and served steaming bowls of refried beans, freshly made guacamole, and crispy flautas. Families enjoyed their meals and lounged in hammocks suspended from a canopy roof surrounding the outdoor fireplace. Curious visitors roamed around the new raised beds, rainwater harvesting and purifying system, greenhouse, and solar-powered bathroom—features that the garden’s steward (and Méndez’s daughter), Carolina Saavedra, had dreamed of since she began helping to rehabilitate the 40-year-old green space in 2019 after it had fallen into disrepair.

The project, named H.earth, is a collaboration between La Morada, the Bronx Land Trust (an organization that manages 18 community gardens in the borough), and the nonprofit design collective Territorial Empathy. Together, the women-led team has transformed the garden into what it calls a sanctuary—a place for community care where people can get a meal, learn about sustainable gardening, or just rest. It’s also a space of cultural preservation where Méndez and Saavedra can teach children about plants and Indigenous medicine and the recipes that have sustained their family for generations. The plan is for the garden to become a resource for La Morada’s mutual aid kitchen, which began serving more than 500 free meals per day during the Covid pandemic and continues to do so.

Against the backdrop of the South Bronx’s relatively slow recovery since the start of the pandemic, as well as multigenerational disinvestment that has included redlining and forced displacement due to highway construction, H.earth demonstrates how community-led architecture can help heal a neighborhood. Last fall, Dwell spoke with Méndez, Saavedra, and Zarith Pineda, the founder of Territorial Empathy, about why this project was important for them to complete.