The master bedroom suite was designed as a tree house that blurs the line between inside and outside. Hoachlander Davis Photography.

Lake Forest, IL Built: 1960

West Va Private residence, Travis Price, architect

Built by the founder of Dansk, Beckoning Path lies in wonderfully landscaped grounds overlooking a private pond. Taconic Builders was privileged to renovate the property for its current owner. Architect: Barlis Wedlick Architect Photo Credit: Peter Aarron/ Esto

Corey Gaffer

Bill Timmerman

This awe-inspiring custom home overlooks the Vail Valley from high on the mountainside. Featuring Vintage Woods siding, ceiling decking, timbers, fascia & soffit as well as custom metal paneling in both interior and exterior application. The metal is mounted to a custom grid mounting system for ease of installation. ©Kimberly Gavin Photography 2016 970-524-4041 www.vintagewoodsinc.net

Gibeon Photography

Bruce Van Inwegen

The living room features twelve-foot by four-foot sheets of high-performance glass on the exterior of the main room are held in place with thermally broken sliding aluminum frames. These can be opened on temperate days, allowing the house to be cooled by cross breezes. Photo: Ben Rahn

Mountain home outdoor living area with a stone firepit and lounge seating. Brands & Kribbs Photography

Joe Fletcher Atop a ridge in the Santa Lucia mountains of Carmel, California, an oak tree stands elevated above the fog and wrapped at its base in this ranch retreat. The weekend home’s design grew around the 100-year-old Valley Oak to form a horseshoe-shaped house that gathers ridgeline views of Oak, Madrone, and Redwood groves at its exterior and nestles around the tree at its center. The home’s orientation offers both the shade of the oak canopy in the courtyard and the sun flowing into the great room at the house’s rear façades. This modern take on a traditional ranch home offers contemporary materials and landscaping to a classic typology. From the main entry in the courtyard, one enters the home’s great room and immediately experiences the dramatic westward views across the 70 foot pool at the house’s rear. In this expansive public area, programmatic needs flow and connect - from the kitchen, whose windows face the courtyard, to the dining room, whose doors slide seamlessly into walls to create an outdoor dining pavilion. The primary circulation axes flank the internal courtyard, anchoring the house to its site and heightening the sense of scale by extending views outward at each of the corridor’s ends. Guest suites, complete with private kitchen and living room, and the garage are housed in auxiliary wings connected to the main house by covered walkways. Building materials including pre-weathered corrugated steel cladding, buff limestone walls, and large aluminum apertures, and the interior palette of cedar-clad ceilings, oil-rubbed steel, and exposed concrete floors soften the modern aesthetics into a refined but rugged ranch home.