For this house, the clients worked with a local firm, CLB Architects, to design a modern house—but to do that using materials and forms that referenced the site’s longer history and that resonated with its place.

On a rocky cliff overlooking the St. Lawrence River, in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, this new house, built with stone masonry and wedged into the topography, seems at first glance to have been on the hillside for well over a century.

When the owners of this house in a heritage enclave of midtown Toronto began to consider what its future might look like, they took a long-range view. The house had stood proudly for 100 years, they figured, so why not position it for another 100? To do that, they turned to Toronto architecture firm Superkül.

When Bourgeois / Lechasseur Architectes, based in Quebec City, was commissioned to design a house in Trois-Rivières near Forges du Saint-Maurice National Historic Site, Bunnett’s painting became an inspiration for the form and spirit of the firm’s design: a heavy stone base with archways beneath a dark-wood upper storey.

On the rugged coast of southern Norway, about three and a half hours south of Oslo, this cabin is a waterfront retreat for a young family. For Kolman Boye Architects, the young Stockholm-based firm that designed this Nordic getaway, the house is the latest in a growing portfolio of projects that explore material innovation and cultural heritage.

Across all elements of the design, the architecture resonates with its surroundings. “What we saw in this site was the potential to live in a way that is beautifully aligned with nature,” the homeowners say.

One of the great draws of living in Los Angeles is the promise of all that Southern California sunlight. Light is so much a part of midcentury modernist design that has come to define the city’s distinctive approach to architecture with its floor-to-ceiling windows and indoor-outdoor living.

When the owners of this Toronto house set about imagining the interior environment, they knew they wanted something out of the ordinary, so they turned to a Toronto-based design firm more typically associated with luxury retail spaces.

When a young family moved from London to a rural hamlet near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, they wanted to be closer to their families. They were also drawn to country living—and the 18th-century stone house they acquired, Follyfield, is surrounded by vast gardens.

With a nod to the clients’ interest in genetics and the site’s ecology, the architects arrayed these panels based on the pattern of the four proteins in a DNA strand from one of the Engelmann spruce that surround the house.