Carpentry experts and architecture firm Llab wrapped every room of the beachfront property with built-ins to create storage, seating, and sleeping arrangements.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect:"Located in Levanto, a seaside town on the Ligurian coast near Cinque Terre in Italy, Surf House is a compact renovation by Llabb that transforms a 1930s villa apartment into a permanent family home. Purchased by a U.S. family, the roughly 1,100-square-foot residence occupies the raised ground floor of the historic Blondet House, part of the urban frontage facing the beach and the sea.
"The existing structure, including load-bearing partitions and the original room layout, shaped Llabb’s approach: rather than radically altering the apartment, the studio recovered its spatial logic while improving its functionality. The new layout accommodates three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study, a generous kitchen, and a living area oriented toward the sea. The main intervention is a continuous custom millwork system in oak and deep blue, which runs through the apartment as both an organizing element and a piece of furniture.
"Developed by Llabb from its background in carpentry, the system integrates kitchen, storage, seating, bookshelves, beds, desks, and wardrobes into a single architectural device. Wood plays a central role throughout the home: in the shared spaces it defines essential volumes, while in the children’s rooms it takes on softer, curved forms inspired by nautical design and surf culture. Carefully positioned openings and visual connections enhance the sense of space while respecting the character of the original villa. Surf House reflects Llabb’s ability to translate craftsmanship into architecture, creating a highly functional and expressive home within a compact footprint and maintaining a strong connection with the surrounding maritime landscape."
A simple guide to the three-layer approach to thoughtful illumination—and how to execute it in every room.
A single overhead light leaves rooms feeling flat and one-dimensional. The so-called "big light," as it is known among its most vocal critics, has become synonymous with sterile-feeling spaces. Somehow, this remains the default setup in most homes—despite the fact that a singular ceiling fixture does little to enhance architecture, create visual interest, or adapt to how we actually use our spaces. There’s more to life, after all, than sufficient brightness.
The solution to unwelcoming spaces like these is layered lighting: a design approach that treats illumination as a multi-dimensional tool, not a binary, on-off function. By combining three distinct layers—ambient, task, and accent—you create depth, flexibility, and visual sophistication. Each layer serves a specific purpose, and together they transform how a space feels and functions.
Layered lighting—ambient, task, and accent—creates depth and visual interest that a single overhead fixture cannot achieve. Govee’s smart ecosystem makes implementing all three layers intuitive and adjustable.
Courtesy of Govee
A beginner’s guide to lighting layers
Ambient lighting provides general illumination. This is the foundational light layer (typically the ceiling fixture) that makes a room usable. Think of it as the baseline brightness that allows you to move through a space safely.
Task lighting, meanwhile, focuses light where you actually need it, whether that’s over a desk for work, above a kitchen counter for cooking, or beside a bed for reading. Task lighting eliminates shadows and allows activities to happen comfortably.
And then there’s accent lighting, which highlights architectural details, artwork, or specific focal points. This is where you add drama, depth, and personality. Accent lighting is the secret-weapon layer that transforms a functional room into a designed one.
Govee’s smart lighting ecosystem lets you adjust everything with a single tap.
Courtesy of Govee
How to execute layered lighting, room by room
Since 2017, Govee has been transforming everyday spaces with its smart lighting solutions. Guided by its mantra, "Life is Colorful," Govee’s innovative lights are designed to transform everyday moments into personalized lighting experiences. Let’s look at how this three-layer lighting approach can come to life in various spaces using their intuitive technology:
Living room
The living room absorbs a wide range of activity over the course of a day—reading, working, hosting, watching television, doing nothing in particular—and most overhead lighting isn’t built to flex with all of it. Layering solves this by giving each function its own source.
The Govee 21-Inch Smart Ceiling Light Ultra sets a soft, adjustable base that becomes the room's ambient foundation. A Govee TV Backlight 3 extends color beyond the screen’s edges, softening the contrast between a bright display and a dark room and reducing eye strain during longer viewing. A Govee Lantern Floor Lamp, ideally placed near the seating area, offers a lower, warmer glow for reading.
Together, the three layers let the room shift registers—bright and functional, dim and cinematic, or somewhere in between—without anyone touching a dimmer switch mid-movie.
Bedroom
Bedrooms are asked to do two contradictory things: energize in the morning, and quiet down at night. A single overhead fixture usually fails at both.
Govee BR30 Smart Bulbs installed in existing fixtures cover the ambient layer, creating illumination that’s bright enough for daily use but adjustable enough to dial back at night. A Govee Lantern Floor Lamp placed in the corner acts as a warm, decorative accent piece, creating a cozy atmosphere for unwinding before bed. A Govee Table Lamp 2 on the nightstand provides focused task lighting for reading in bed (and is contained enough that it won't disturb a partner already asleep). Behind the headboard, a Govee Strip Light 2 Pro adds a subtle accent, tracing the wall’s architecture and giving the room definition even when the primary lights are off.
Transform your space with LuminBlend+ technology. With 2100 lumens and a 170° wide beam, it is the perfect lighting solution. Thanks to its double-sided illumination and AI-powered smart controls, it can adapt to any lighting requirement with ease.
Elevate your everyday space with RGBICWW technology that blends vivid colors and tunable white light, all wrapped in a timeless desk lamp design—portable, smart, and ready for any moment.
Elevate your space with Govee Ceiling Light Ultra, combining ultra-dense pixel precision, limitless creative expression, and high-quality white light for everyday living.
Kitchen
Kitchens are functional by necessity, but that doesn’t mean they need to feel clinical. A single overhead light tends to cast shadows exactly where precision matters most (over the cutting board, or along the counter) while offering little to soften the room once the cooking is done and the gathering begins.
A Govee 15-Inch Smart Ceiling Light Pro can be the key to the room’s general brightness. A Govee COB Strip Light Pro, installed under the cabinets, delivers direct task lighting over the countertop, eliminating shadows. Above the island, Govee ST19 Smart Edison Bulbs in pendant fixtures can add a warmer, more atmospheric layer. A kitchen, after all, should be just as functional for prepping as it is lingering.
A mix of floor lamps, ceiling lights, and uplighting is the secret to warm, welcoming spaces.
The 1978 home has a traditional brick facade and refreshed interiors with terra-cotta tile floors.
Location: van Beeverlaan 6-A1251 ES, Laren, the Netherlands
Price: €1,995,000 (approximately $2,298,379 USD)
Year: 1978
Renovation Year: 2008
Renovation Designer: Ineke Hilhorst
Renovation Architect: Paco Bunnik
Footprint: 2,820 Square Feet (5 Beds, 3 Baths)
Lot Size: 0.3 Acres
From the Listing: "This remarkable detached villa designed by interior decorator Ineke Hilhorst lies on quiet, dead-end lane that opens directly onto the moors in Laren, the Netherlands. Behind the antique French doors, a generous residence unfolds where light, space, and atmosphere come together in harmonious balance. During an extensive renovation carried out in collaboration with architect Paco Bunnik, the 1970s semi-bungalow received a contemporary update with large window walls, French doors wrapping around the home, and an atelier-style window at the front. The eat-in kitchen features antique schoolroom doors to the hall, which can be fully opened to garden views from all sides.The floor plan allows for single-story living. On the ground floor are the owners’ study rooms, both with views onto the lane. On the upper level is the primary bedroom with en-suite bathroom, equipped with a soaking tub, shower, vanity, and toilet. In all rooms, bespoke wardrobes are built in. Outside, multiple terraces, mature plantings, full privacy fencing, and an automatic irrigation system with its own well ensure comfort and privacy. The grounds also include a double garage with a large attic space."
The thatched roof is one of the home’s most distinctive qualities.
Beloved for her approachable recipes, the most popular cooking writer on Substack worked with friend and designer Lily Wick to make a space that would simplify work and family time in her California home.
The Carmel Valley, California-based Caroline Chambers—food content creator, newsletter writer, and bestselling author of What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking (2024)—had just finished renovating a house in early 2025 with her husband George when a pregnancy with a fourth child hurled them into a whirlwind plan B. They decided to find a bigger place (they closed on a 100-year-old farmhouse last May), renovate it all summer, welcome the baby in July, and move in by September.
That plan, with its aggressive timeline, didn’t come to fruition. Instead, the home chef, who’s best known for making fast and adaptable meals, had to somewhat take a step back and let the planning and building of her new kitchen take the appropriate time it required. In September 2025, the family temporarily moved into the new property’s two small cottages—each parent took a cottage with two kids. Although Chambers describes the experience as "complete chaos for two and a half months," she says it was kismet that their new farmhouse came with two liveable cottages with kitchens, which is uncommon for the area. Many of their family meals during that time were simplified and involved a lot of grilling. Chambers also slowed down her work pace with her pregnancy.
The family of six officially moved into the main farmhouse in late November. The house wasn’t fully renovated at that point (construction was ongoing through December), but the kitchen was complete, and Chambers could finally make use of the most important room for her line of work. Even though her self-imposed September deadline wasn’t met, Chambers still acknowledges that, all things considered, the kitchen wrapped in a flash.
The property includes two small cottages and overlooks the Santa Lucia Mountains.
Photo by Soraya Matos
"My best friend Lily Wick is my designer, and if it wasn’t my best friend working with me, we never could have renovated the kitchen that fast," says Chambers. She remembers "pleading with my contractor to at least have the kitchen finished by late October," so that photos could be included in her second cookbook, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking: Make It Fast, a new recipe collection out August 11, comprising of 15- and 30-minute meals and one chapter devoted to meals you can fully walk-away from. The book was written with busy parents in mind, who need to "make a lot of food fast for hungry children," says Chambers.
Speed was also the name of the game when it came to the kitchen renovation. Since it was the first major project, Chambers and Wick made important design decisions that invariably set the tone for the rest of the house. Inspiration emerged from Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, Chambers’ Southern upbringing, the color green, and an appreciation for antiques and handcrafted items. There were parts of the new kitchen design that felt like an intentional departure from her previous kitchen. "I went against how I think a great kitchen should be designed for creating content," Chambers says. "My old kitchen was perfect for content—the stove was on the island so I could set up a camera on the other side of the island and shoot across it and demo really well whatever I was cooking."
Now, her stove sits against a wall, which is more typical. Early on, Chambers considered an island stove for shooting purposes, but ultimately opted for a huge island instead, seeing the potential for it to become a central gathering area: someplace for the kids to not only eat at but sit on top of, that they could throw their backpacks onto, or where friends and guests could spread out for dinner parties and cocktails. "A stove in the middle of the island would interrupt all that, so I’ve adjusted to shooting the stove from the side and it’s working out just fine," she says. For how much of a time-crunch they were in, Chambers is thrilled with how her kitchen turned out, which blends old farmhouse charms with industrial modernity.
Install a secret bar
Behind a set of cabinet doors is a full bar, which is on display for dinner parties.
Photo by Soraya Matos
The original kitchen had three small closets next to each other. They kept one closet to stash cleaning supplies, but knocked down the other two closets to rebuild them as a pantry-bar hybrid. The bar, which tucks away behind a set of doors, has its own ice maker and beverage fridge. "I don’t like when bars are on display, but when we have company, we can open this up and have a full bar moment, which has come in handy because we have people over a lot," says Chambers.
There are very few addresses in the entire Metro New Orleans market where you can wake each morning to unobstructed, panoramic views of Lake Pontchartrain. Positioned directly on the water in Metairie’s most coveted lakefront corridor, this three-level contemporary estate offers interiors swathed in floor-to-ceiling glass, where every principal room frames a different chapter of the lake's ever-changing light.
A saltwater pool and heated spa anchor the outdoor living level, while a primary suite balcony and terraces extend the entertaining footprint from the water’s edge skyward across three stories of dramatic architecture. An in-residence heated sauna adds a layer of wellness amenity rarely found outside of true luxury compounds.
Inside, the interiors are appointed with designer-grade counters, stainless appliances, a wine cooler, gas fireplace, and the kind of generous natural light that only direct southern water exposure can deliver. Energy-efficient windows, water heater, and multi-zone climate control speak to the thoughtfulness of the home's systems.
The home sits just minutes from Lakeside Mall, New Orleans’ premier dining corridors, Louis Armstrong International Airport, and I-10 access, placing downtown New Orleans, the Northshore, Ochsner and Tulane medical centers, and the French Quarter all within a short drive. Perhaps most enticing is the offer for bond for deed financing for qualified buyers with negotiable down payment, competitive rate structure, and customized payment terms. Even the furniture is included.
Listing Details
Bedrooms: 4
Baths: 3 full, 1 partial
Year Built: 1986
Square feet: 4,431
Plot Size: 0.2 acres
Courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty
Courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty
Courtesy of Crescent Sotheby's International Realty
A recent competition engineered to take advantage of new pro-density legislation has already helped fund the development of 20 units.
Debates around housing development are often chicken-or-the-egg. To build more housing quickly we must have legislative changes that allow for more housing to be built; but in order to build public consensus around such legislation—to defeat the NIMBY class—we must demonstrate that density is not the enemy, and that new housing can be built without neglecting good design. In recent years, Los Angeles has had a perfect confluence of chickens and eggs: the state and city have begun to loosen restrictions that slow down new developments, while groups like CityLab-UCLA, an interdisciplinary urban development research hub, have been capitalizing on the changes by soliciting proposals from the design and development community to get new homes built across the city’s thousands of vacant lots.
Last year, as Dwell previously reported, CityLab-UCLA launched their Small Lots/Big Impact design competition, which sought plans for a variety of multifamily housing typologies using city-owned land. Winners were selected and announced last spring. But as many design competitions go, their award-winning ideas were just that—ideas. To actually bring new homes to life, CityLab-UCLA partnered with local community development financial institution Genesis LA to introduce a subsequent competition, a request for information from developers and architects looking to build new owner-occupied housing, between three and ten units, on privately-owned land smaller than half an acre.
King 1101 Apartments, a previous project by one of the winning firms, Holos Communities, in Los Angeles.
Photo courtesy Holos Communities
This week, they’ve announced three winners of their RFI that, with Genesis funding, will cover 95 percent of the development costs, according to CityLab-UCLA. On the smallest side, Stayner Architects will construct between five and seven units on a single lot in Echo Park; Holos Communities and Assemblage Works, which proposed a modular multifamily development, will target East Hollywood; and the team of co-developers Six Peak Capital and Frolic Community, with architects West of West and Aero Collective, plan to build eight units on a single lot on the city’s west side.
Los Angeles, and California at large, have been leading the nation in overhauling their housing restrictions: Over the last five years, state and local governments have legalized ADUs statewide, streamlined multifamily permitting, and helped developers mitigate costly development fees. Very recently, California made it legal to subdivide individual lots to construct multiple homes on one parcel through SB 1123, which passed last year and went into effect last summer. Now, developers don’t need variances to add up to ten homes on a lot, which saves time (and dollars) on development and construction. The CityLab RFI capitalizes on SB 1123, says Emmanuel Proussaloglou, CityLab co-director. "There wasn’t a particularly economically viable development path on a lot of these lots up until recently, and now there’s a sort of push to see what we can do with it," he says.
Importantly, all of the lots that will be developed are privately owned—a departure from their original design competition that solicited ideas for the nearly 4,000 city-owned vacant lots. They decided to pivot their RFI to use privately-owned land as a way to avoid the lags of getting approvals from city officials. "We made sure that the winners of the design competition would be the most eligible and promising partners for any development deal—private or public," says Dana Cuff, CityLab’s director. In addition to the 4,000 city-owned parcels, there are around 24,000 privately-owned vacant parcels, she continues, many of which are ripe for housing development.
Though renderings are provided for each of the winning designs (two of the projects by Stayner and Six Peak/Frolic were included in the Small Lots ideas competition), they are not finalized, Proussaloglou says. Rather than the usual glossy imagery of many design competitions, he continues, the RFI jury looked for submitting teams that had completed previous work that aligned with their vision.
Winners are responsible for selecting their lots and securing entitlements; only one, Stayner Architects, already owns the lot on which they’ll build. The others are now "targeting" specific areas: The co-development team of Six Peak Capital and Frolic Community is looking at sites in neighborhoods like Venice where land will be more expensive, but Proussaloglou says that they have experience in developing alternative home ownership models to separate expensive land costs from unit costs. Holos Communities and Assemblage Works are targeting East Hollywood, he continues, where they hope to show a proof of concept around modular construction technology’s efficiency. Finding an eligible parcel isn’t easy and securing entitlements can be a long process; CityLab has a set timeline, and in the case that the winning teams cannot secure land there are 11 "bench" winners who can step in.
"We will be able to work alongside the teams to make sure that the laws that are in place are ones that the planning department and all the different review agencies know how to deploy. Since they are kind of new laws, that will be a job for us to work with alongside the development and design team to make sure that it all goes smoothly and according to law," adds Cuff.
The Steps on St. Andrews, another project by Holos Communities in Los Angeles.
Photo courtesy Holos Communities
They hope that these new homes will be completed by 2029. It seems far off, considering that there will only be around 20 new units added to Los Angeles’s housing landscape, but CityLab organizers believe that their transparent, open-source process will influence how other developers take advantage of the new pro-density laws. "We are going to share as much as we can about the winning submissions—the designs, the pro formas, the summary documents from all 30 submissions," says Proussaloglou. Considering the climate in the Los Angeles real estate market, those developers who own lots and are ready to hit the ground running might have a leg up once the 20 forthcoming units are completed, and landing a chance to whittle down that list of 24,000 empty lots and turn them into a group of new homes as soon as possible.
Moored in Seattle’s Portage Bay, the 1958 residence by architect Gerald van Slyck conjures up cabin vibes with cozy wood-wrapped interiors.
Location: 3130 Portage Bay Place E #C, Seattle, Washington
Price: $1,175,000
Year Built: 1958
Original Architect: Gerald Van Slyck
Footprint: 833 square feet (1 bed, 1 bath)
From the Agent: "Come live in your custom floating home with 43-foot moorage, parking, and a well-managed HOA. Enjoy the perfect balance of lakeside tranquility and city convenience in this floating home by architect Gerald Van Slyck. Vaulted ceilings and expansive windows flood the home with natural light, while two outdoor spaces offer seamless indoor/outdoor living on the water. A rare and atypical 43-foot moorage offers exceptional flexibility to accommodate a wide range of vessels, including sailboats. A well-managed HOA covers utilities and supports long-term upkeep for easy ownership. Live on the lake with quick access to Seattle’s metropolitan neighborhoods, dining, cafes, and entertainment."
The houseboat has been staged by furniture maker Keeps, rug design practice Studio Tenjung, and local vintage design shop In The Comfort Of.
Photo by Emily Un
Photo by Emily Un
A 1950s modular sofa by Martin Borenstein anchors the living, accented by Studio Tenjung’s Liwu yak wool rug.
