It Was a Pub, Then a Grocery Store. Now It’s a Home With a Three-Level Glass Block Addition

A translucent garage topped with a patio completes the transformation of the late-1800s building.

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.

Project Details:

Location: Sydney, Australia

Architect: Ian Moore Architects / @ianmoorearchitects

Footprint: 2,787 square feet

Builder: Bright Build

Structural Engineer: Cantilever Engineers

Landscape Design: Outdoor Establishments

Photographer: Clinton Weaver / @_clintonweaver

From the Architect: "Originally constructed in 1869 as a Public House, known as The Moore Park Hotel, it was converted in 1921to a fruit and vegetable shop with upper level accommodation and in the 1960s to a corner grocery store, which it remained until 2022. The brief was to convert the three-story building to a single three-bedroom house. Located in a Heritage Conservation Area, the local Council wanted all new work to be clearly differentiated from the original structure.

"A new three-story, steel framed rear wing has been constructed, clad in translucent glass blocks. This new rear wing abuts the original facade but is set back slightly to clearly articulate new from old. In order to allow natural light and ventilation to the lower level living areas, an internal courtyard has been cut through the original section of the building with a new steel and timber stair rising alongside the courtyard to the upper level bedroom and a large roof terrace set behind the original parapet. New oak flooring is used throughout the upper levels, with terrazzo tiles for the lower level living areas, terraces, and bathrooms. Oak veneer is used for the kitchen joinery and the bathrooms are lined in colorback glass.

"The house in not air conditioned and relies on natural cross ventilation and ceiling fans, sun shading to all windows and doors, heavily insulated roof and walls, solar panels, electric heat pump hot water, LED lighting, all electric appliances, and electric heat pump hydronic underfloor heating and radiators."

Photo: Clinton Weaver

Photo: Clinton Weaver

Photo: Clinton Weaver

See the full story on Dwell.com: It Was a Pub, Then a Grocery Store. Now It’s a Home With a Three-Level Glass Block Addition
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Budget Breakdown: The Kitchen Is the Star of This €211K Barcelona Penthouse Revamp

A pastry chef and a perfusionist splurge on bespoke cabinetry and fluted glass to fill their run-down flat with light, color, and curves.

Whether you’re buying or renting, the housing stock in Barcelona is chronically depleted. So when Carlos García and Victor Gómez came across a top-floor apartment in the newly fashionable Sagrada Familia district, they jumped at the opportunity—and not only because of its close-up vistas of Gaudí’s famous basilica.

You can see the Sagrada Familia from a patio of the penthouse apartment Serboli Bureau renovated for Carlos García and Victor Gómez.

Photo by Pol Viladoms

"It was the terrace and large balcony that felt right," says Victor. "And because the apartment is three floors higher than our immediate neighbors, we wouldn’t be annoyed by noise through shared walls." Before signing the deed, they called in an architect they knew, Andrea Serboli, to inspect the property for humidity and structural faults. He ended up taking charge of its transformation from a run-down, angle-cut dwelling into a delightful home where color and curves set a tone as inviting as the city itself.

A portrait of homeowners Carlos García and Victor Gómez standing in their updated kitchen. 

Photo by Pol Viladoms

The home’s walls are largely painted in a neutral shade: Royal Flax by Benjamin Moore. The interior of the red storage units is covered in a veneer Ettore Sottsass designed for ALPI.

Photo by Pol Viladoms

See the full story on Dwell.com: Budget Breakdown: The Kitchen Is the Star of This €211K Barcelona Penthouse Revamp
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Asking $1.9M, This Gilded Age Missouri Estate Is a Slice of History

Originally built in 1885, the landmark property includes two residences and a carriage house embellished with ornate woodwork, stained glass windows, and encaustic tile.

Location: 809 & 819 Hall Street, St. Joseph, Missouri

Price: $1,850,000 - $2,350,000

Year Built: 1885

Architect: Edmond Jacques Eckel

Footprint: 9,850 Square Feet (8 Bedrooms, 10 Baths)

Lot Size: 1.83 Acres

From the Agent: "Few properties anywhere in America can claim what the Shakespeare Chateau offers: over 140 years of architectural integrity, a nationally recognized historic designation, and a depth of original craftsmanship that simply cannot be replicated. Completed in 1885 by architect Edmond Jacques Eckel for Colonel Nathan Phipps Ogden, this chateauesque landmark occupies a commanding position along historic Hall Street, once known as Millionaires’ Row, and stands today as one of the most intact gilded age estates in the country. The property spans just under two acres across a true multibuilding campus: the grand main residence at 809 Hall Street, a carriage house with three income-producing apartments, and the historic companion structure at 819 Hall Street: a pre–Civil War brick building offering compelling redevelopment potential and original period chandeliers throughout. For the right family or individual, this is simply one of the most extraordinary private residences available in America today. The Shakespeare Chateau is offered across two distinct paths: a Residential Offering at $1,850,000, conveying real estate only; and a Commercial Offering at $2,350,000, which includes most furnishings, operational FF&E, business assets, website, and brand, allowing a qualified buyer to assume operations with minimal friction."

The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo by Josiah Carlson of Carlson Home Photography

Photo by Josiah Carlson of Carlson Home Photography

Photo by Josiah Carlson of Carlson Home Photography

See the full story on Dwell.com: Asking $1.9M, This Gilded Age Missouri Estate Is a Slice of History

Trellises With Cor-Ten Cutouts Wrap the Facade of This Renovated U.K. Home

Stars and diamonds fixed to wire grids create a play of shadows that shifts throughout the day.

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.

Project Details:

Location: Waldringfield, United Kingdom

Designer: Giles Miller / @gilesmiller

Footprint: 2,250 square feet

Builder and Structural Engineer: Rupert Owles Woodbridge

Landscape Design: RAM Landscapes

Cabinetry: Bespoke You Carpentry & Joinery

Photographer: Leah Band

From the Designer: "The first I saw of Folk House was an estate agents brochure with an image of a tired looking 1930s bungalow at a reasonable price in a lovely location, but a far cry from appealing in any kind of way. As an artist and designer, I’m drawn to older buildings and enjoy working to celebrate their character, but in this case I had to rely on the new owner's enthusiasm for the project to inspire optimism. Thankfully, our client is a visionary and together we collaborated to lift the building into a new chapter centered around family, comfort, materiality, and the gorgeous Suffolk countryside. I worked with clients Jo Gillingwater and Roddy Monroe, as well as my own studio team which included architect Laura Nica to extend the upper story of the building (creating new living and bedroom spaces), raise the ground floor ceiling height to introduce light and headspace, and to introduce a contemporary layout that brought the building new levels of functionality and comfort as a family home.

"The architectural evolution of the space is dramatic, adding value and enhancing the experience for the owners and their guests. But the starting point and arguably the end game with this project, (and indeed my studio's involvement) was always about the materiality of the space, including an opportunity to create a large-scale artwork on the facade of the building to bring another rich layer to the experience of it. We thought about the beautiful river Deben which can be seen from the house, and the history of the village of Waldringfield, which used to be home to cement factories and their kiln chimneys on the waterfront. We also considered how an artwork might be used to embed the structure into its natural surroundings, whilst also creating a softening to the planar aesthetic of the building through a uniquely tactile and textured ‘trellis’ mural. The facade artwork is made up of a series of wires connected by a mass of rusted Cor-Ten plates, offset from the surface of the building to create beautiful shadow play, and allowing planted jasmine to climb up the base of the building and nestle it into the surrounding landscape. The plates are also composed to generate an abstracted visual image of the flowing river water created by their composition and angle.

"The tactility and natural qualities of the facade artwork feed into the internal experience of the building, for which Jo Gillingwater curated a wonderous array of textiles, artworks, and lighting to extend the sense of calm and the ‘lift’ that comes with a space which is so rich in sensory artistry. A kitchen inspired by Donald Judd's furniture and paintings by Louise Craigie amongst others create the final layer of reveal, making for a calming and nurturing space that has art and creative collaboration at its heart."

Photo by Leah Band

Photo by Leah Band

Photo by Leah Band

See the full story on Dwell.com: Trellises With Cor-Ten Cutouts Wrap the Facade of This Renovated U.K. Home

In New Mexico, $995K Gets You a Life-Size Lincoln Log Cabin

The rustic retreat comes with lofted spaces, a standalone studio, and remarkable views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Location: 178 Quintana Road, Questa, New Mexico 

Price: $995,000

Year Built: 1980

Renovation Year: 2005

Footprint: 2,668 Square Feet (3 Bedrooms, 2.5 Baths)  

Lot Size: 2.02 Acres

From the Listing: "Set just outside Taos, 178 Quintana Road offers a rare blend of handcrafted design, natural beauty, and thoughtfully elevated living. This distinctive log home was originally built with hand-harvested materials and enduring craftsmanship, then carefully reimagined over time into a refined yet understated retreat that balances Scandinavian simplicity with classic, Northern New Mexico warmth. Inside, the home unfolds with exposed wood throughout, custom detailing, and a natural flow. A primary suite addition integrates seamlessly with the original structure, offering comfort, light, and elevated views. The outdoor setting is equally compelling. Set among mature trees with established gardens, fruit plantings, and open lawn areas, the property has been cultivated into a true high-desert oasis. A wraparound deck and upper-level vantage points capture expansive views of the surrounding mountains and sky."

This chinked-log cabin is located near Carson National Forest in New Mexico. 

Photo by Kaela Rannikar Photography LLC

Photo by Kaela Rannikar Photography LLC

Photo by Kaela Rannikar Photography LLC

See the full story on Dwell.com: In New Mexico, $995K Gets You a Life-Size Lincoln Log Cabin
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Before & After: How a Couple Revived a Quirky Hamptons Home With Ties to the Bauhaus

Designed by Charles Forberg—son-in-law of the school’s founder, Walter Gropius—the residence came with a dramatic triangular roof, but a host of livability concerns.

There are a few things Charles Forberg—son-in-law of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius—got right when he designed a home for a sculptor and her husband along the Accabonac Harbor in East Hampton, New York, in the 1990s.

Stark concrete walls. Eye-catching triangular roofs. A site with a view of a salt marsh straight out of a fairy tale.

"It was unlike anything else," says Brooklyn-based set designer Dina Goldman, thinking back to the first time she viewed the home in 2022, just days after it hit the market.

Before: Exterior

Before: On a two-acre, shoreline property, architect Charles Forberg designed a home composed of cedar-clad, triangular prisms set atop poured concrete bases. 

Photo courtesy of Berg Design Architecture

Around then, she and her husband, Drew Kunin, a sound engineer, had made the difficult decision to sell a proudly idiosyncratic—but increasingly falling-apart—summer home that her parents built in Bridgehampton when she was a child. While she hadn’t always intended to sell the property, she and Drew felt the surrounding hamlet had been losing character as loose local laws allowed for smaller cottages to be bought up by developers who were eager to build large, showy homes. As Drew recalls, living in the "Glamour Hamptons" didn’t feel right for film-industry creatives, who were just hungry for community.

Over in the nearby, famously artsy hamlet of Springs, the newly available Forberg home presented the perfect opportunity for a fresh start.

Or at least, nearly perfect.

"The house itself felt like this incredible sculpture in the landscape," says architect John Berg, whose firm, Berg Design Architecture, was hired by the couple when they purchased the home. "Forberg just missed the mark on what would connect the spaces to the landscape—and some livability issues."

After: Exterior 

The addition of large dormer windows (one of two pictured on the left) increases the volume of usable space, while offering second-floor views of the harbor. 

Photo by Simon Lawrence Howell

The biggest issue? Arguably the triangular roofline, which—striking as it was from the outside—created a hazard for anyone on the second floor who got too close.

"There were a lot of places to bang your head," Berg says.

After agonizing over shapes and angles, Berg, along with the firm’s studio director, Alex Chaintreuil, designed a pair of oversize dormer windows that project outward from the sloped roof. The effect was a dramatic increase in the amount of walking space on the second level. 

"We didn’t want it to look like another hand had come along and disrespected his design," says renovation architect  John Berg. "We wanted it to look like it had always been there." 

Photo by Simon Lawrence Howell

See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: How a Couple Revived a Quirky Hamptons Home With Ties to the Bauhaus
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The Venice Architecture Biennale’s 2027 Theme Is a Reality Check

The cocurators of next year’s exhibition—with the blunt, but open-ended title "Do Architecture"—are squarely focused on the crises that architects face today, from craftsmanship to climate change.

Like global design fairs, architecture’s biennials and triennials are, fundamentally, opportunities to showcase the most pressing ideas in the field; curators provide an expert glimpse into the professional and academic practices that envision what the future might hold. The Venice Biennale—the most prestigious of such fairs—has provided the world with many prospects: In 2023, curator Leslie Lokko’s The Laboratory of the Future invited architects, academics, and artists to imagine a decolonized and decarbonized African continent; in 2021, curator Hashim Sarkis’s How We Live Together exhibition explored how we might cohabitate generously during times of political and social divisions. These underlying themes ask participants to think through how the built environment can shape or play a role in shaping future possibilities. In some ways, many of the most recent editions have been intrinsically optimistic.

The forthcoming edition, which opens in the spring of 2027, will instead ask participants to instead address the here-and-now. Hangzhou-based architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, cofounders of the firm Amateur Architecture Studio, were selected in 2025 to curate. Their work, which bridges contemporary buildings with material reuse and historic knowledge, announced their biennale theme this week: Do Architecture - For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality. To be honest, I laughed when I first read the ArchDaily headline; the curators of the world’s most prestigious biennale are asking architects to do the thing that they are trained to do. The duo seems to be tapping into whatever hope and optimism that could exist within that invitation—to simply do—in the context of our warming planet, degrading infrastructure, and artificial intelligence sucking up our natural resources and cognitive capabilities. These curators are turning away from the speculative, asking instead how architects might take action.

The National Archives of Publications and Culture in Hangzhou (left) and Museum of Ancient Animals in Baoding (right) are among Amateur Architecture Studio’s best known buildings.

Left photo: Ji Yun, right photo: Laksana Studio

The invitation to do feels strangely spot-on, and comes with a critique of the common role of speculative design during our current range of daily catastrophes. Reality, as a term, plays an important role: They call it "real reality" outright, making a distinction between the imagined conditions in which many architectural concepts would be welcome (and likely funded)—these might look like sci-fi-esque futures where the problems of humanity like war, famine, and disease, have been eradicated; or, wherein funding for extravagant design propositions is plentiful. Unfortunately for us, none of that is real, and architects instead are often working upstream of the existing political, financial, and climate-related constraints. There’s always a space for imagination, but according to the curators, focusing solely on these fantastical states (and designing solely for them) has larger implications.

"Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality and overcommercialization tends to be merely popular and short-lived," the curators wrote in their statement. "It will lead to the death of architecture."

The Hungarian Pavilion at the Giardini (left) and the Catalonia Pavilion, titled Catalonia in Venice 2025, are two exhibitions from 2025’s messy biennale. 

Left photo: Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images, right photo: Simone Padovani/Getty Images

One can’t help but feel that this thematic choice is a direct rebuke of the Venice Biennale’s most recent 2025 edition. Under the curatorial leadership of Carlo Ratti, a professor at MIT, architecture’s future was shown through his selected theme of Intelligens—artificial, natural, and collective—that hoped to show "how we can adapt to the world of tomorrow with confidence and optimism," per the curatorial statement. The resulting exhibition was described as "daunting and dense": 300 unique installations explored the theme through myriad technological whizzgigs. Visitors encountered robotics in architectural craft, humanoids, algae, espresso brewed with purified canal water, blobs, drones, and much more. It was called a noisy, "tech bro fever dream" by ArtReview; the Guardian characterized the show as unfocused, "like trying to complete the internet." The edition boiled our current affairs down to problems that can be solved with an array of technocratic one-liners. "Don’t fear the climate crisis," the Guardian continues, sardonically, "a harmonious union of technology and nature will save us."

Instead, 2027 cocurators Shu and Wenyu are asking architects to acknowledge the role that their profession plays in such ecological collapse. Speaking at the thematic announcement in Venice this week, they said that "architecture must recognize the depth of the crisis in which it finds itself,’" Designboom reports. But it’s not just the climate crisis that the curatorial vision will touch upon; the thematic announcement also includes issues related to land, material, and craft—the essential elements that speak to a building’s relationship with its specific place and time. It’s unsurprising, considering Amateur Architecture Studio’s portfolio, which has frequently combined recycled building materials and adaptive reuse strategies that speak to traditional building practices, particularly in China where rapid urbanization and demolition has resulted in the large-scale vernacular loss.

At left, the Canal Café project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro turned Venice lagoon water into coffee during the 2025 biennale. The Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels work Am I a Strange Loop? was exhibited in the Corderie Pavilion. 

Photos: Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Images

See the full story on Dwell.com: The Venice Architecture Biennale’s 2027 Theme Is a Reality Check
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