A raised volume forms an entry sequence that leads to more robust living spaces and a kids’ play area with shelving on tracks.
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: "Live Sawn House confronts a paradox in contemporary Japanese forestry: thick, high-quality sugi (Japanese cedar) logs are valued less than thinner ones. This inversion stems from postwar reforestation policies and the decline of sawmills capable of processing large timber, leaving mature cultivated trees underutilized. Forestry workers lament that decades of growth are sold cheaply and cut into standardized pieces. Rejecting this logic, the project embraces an alternative: showcasing thick logs in their raw, expressive form using dara-biki (live sawing), a traditional method that reveals each tree’s unique character while maximizing yield and structural integrity.
"This two-story residence occupies an irregular urban site with a winding alley. Built on a modest budget, it integrates design with material sourcing. The building system is straightforward and legible: 105 millimeter planks are used for corner and wind-exposed columns, while 70 millimeter planks serve lighter loads; beams are consistently 105 millimeter thick. Boards retain natural edges and occasional bark, enriching visual texture while minimizing waste. Timber is oriented along the grain, ensuring high bending strength without industrial processing.
"In a dense residential district outside Saitama, the largest city in one of Tokyo’s neighboring prefectures, the building appears from the street only in fragments: a slender box raised on rhythmic timber posts. The ground floor contains the dining kitchen, while living and sleeping areas occupy the upper floor. A suspended walk-in closet—skywalk-in-closet—extends over the alley, culminating in a study nook. Below, timber pilotis allude to the wooden interior structure. The children’s space features movable shelves for adaptability. By embracing the overlooked potential of thick sugi logs, Live Sawn House proposes a sustainable, site-specific architecture grounded in material honesty, craftsmanship, and respect for local forestry traditions."
From the Agent:"Located on a high floor, this balcony apartment is situated in the Flandre district of Paris. Completely renovated by the architects of ALORS Studio, it offers open and bright spaces. The entrance leads to a spacious living area oriented toward the northwest, featuring a living room with a library, a dining area, and a fully equipped kitchen. The apartment also includes a bedroom with balcony access, a shower room, a dressing room, and built-in closets."
Depending on who you ask, a 5,000-square-foot home on New York’s Petra Island is either "designed" or "inspired" by the famed American architect. Who’s right? (And does it even matter?)
"Welcome to fantasy island!" crows George Smart, CEO of the preservation group USModernist. He’s standing on one of the outdoor terraces of a waterfront house built on an 11-acre private island on New York’s Lake Mahopac, greeting me and a group of architecture enthusiasts who have just arrived by boat to tour the place. It’s a striking structure, with a long cantilever that stretches over a rocky shore and gently lapping waves. As we ascend the two dozen red-painted stairs from the dock to the front patio, we meet Smart and Joe Massaro, the house’s owner, who are enveloped in a plume of smoke from the fireplaces Massaro just lit inside and on the balcony. "Good old Frank Lloyd Wright," Massaro says, wiping soot from his face and hands as he begins the tour. "Do you want to start with the smoke or the leaks?"
The house, located on Petra Island, is one of the most ambitious, unusual, and architecturally controversial buildings in the region. Wright sketched plans for it in 1949 after his client, Ahmed Chahroudi, asked for a masterpiece. Chahroudi wasn’t able to afford the design and deferred construction, but then commissioned a 1,200-square-foot guest cottage, which Wright completed in 1953. The drawing for the cantilevered main house then became part of the architect’s list of hundreds of unbuilt projects. Fast forward to the 2000s when Massaro, who purchased the island in the 1990s, discovered drawings for the 5,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house and decided to complete it.
The Massaro House in New York’s Hudson Valley is built into the natural rock of Petra Island.
Courtesy Petra Island Tours / Wright Over Water
If Smart’s greeting is a reference to the 1970s television show about an island where secret dreams come true, then Massaro is like Mr. Roarke, the main character who fulfilled the fantasies. For certain fans of Frank Lloyd Wright—those who have visited as many of the architect’s projects as they can, like Smart—being able to step inside just one more of his buildings, especially one in such a dramatic setting, is like hitting the jackpot. "This is an astonishing achievement, it really is," Smart would later tell our group. "It takes a lot of courage and perseverance to be able to put together a project like this."
However, not all historians share this perspective. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, an organization tasked with preserving the architect’s legacy and the heir to all of his intellectual property, does not consider the house Massaro built as a true Wright work. (It does, however, recognize the guesthouse.) In fact, Massaro was embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with the Foundation over this point in the 2000s. As a result of the suit’s settlement, Massaro is required to describe it as "Wright-inspired." Not that he believes it. "It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house," he tells me on the tour. "I can only say that it’s ‘inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.’ And I tell everybody, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright inspired me to build this masterpiece,’ and that’s what I did." The authorship questions over the Massaro house illuminate broader challenges over posthumously completed buildings by famous architects. Who gets to decide attribution? And should these projects even be completed?
Joe Massaro (pictured right) hosted a media tour of the Petra Island main house and guest cottage in early May.
Courtesy Diana Budds
Massaro, a 79-year-old retired sheet metal entrepreneur, is exceedingly proud of his home. "You walk in this door, you know it’s Frank Lloyd Wright," he says. To enter, I step down into a narrow porch and pass through a glass front door and arrive in an expansive receiving room illuminated by triangular skylights. ("There’s twenty six skylights here; twenty six chances to leak," Massaro quips.) From there, I walk straight ahead to reach the dramatic cantilevered living room, where Massaro has set up a video explaining the house’s backstory with holograms of himself and Wright as narrators. The house is split-level; to the left of the entry and up a few steps is the kitchen, dining area, bathroom (which features a giant rock in the shower), and bedrooms. The floors are painted a deep terra-cotta red and the ceilings are warm, varnished wood.
The house feels somewhat Wrightian, thanks to the materials, the relationship to the site, the hearths, and the classic compression and expansion. However, certain elements seem off—LED string lights visible in the crevices of the skylights, which are domed in shape, and, especially, the fieldstone affixed to the walls. Because of building codes and structural requirements, Massaro couldn’t use stone masonry; instead he chose reinforced concrete and then attached rocks to the surface.
Massaro and his architect, Thomas Heinz, an author of over a dozen books on Wright, had to fill in many blanks in order to build the house. "I had a detailed architecture plan but no specifications on the interior," Massaro says of the drawings they worked from, which detailed the floor plan, sections, and elevations. "I could tell from working on a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright houses over the years what it was going to be like inside," says Heinz, who had previously constructed homes from plans Wright drew during a time when the Foundation was more open with its archive.
They also looked to other Wright houses to inform their decisions. "We flew all over the country looking at houses and getting details because the interior details were never completed," Massaro says. A painting behind a built-in banquette in the living room was inspired by one he saw in Blauvelt, New York. He got window details from a visit to the Reisley House in Usonia and riffed on fixtures he saw in another Wright house—he says he can’t remember which—for a series of multicolored lights on an interior half wall. "I couldn’t buy them, so I built them," Massaro says. He and his wife, Linda, designed hexagonal rugs to match the dimensions of the triangular grid on the floor and had them custom-made in India.
A photo from the construction of the house in the 2000s.
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.
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."
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.
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
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
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.
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 startingpoint 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."
