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A Decade's Most Remarkable Homes

Experts pick five standouts; a wheelchair's limits lead to creativity

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It could have been architecture's golden era.

Breaking the Mold

Over the last decade, American homeowners flush with credit poured a staggering $4.7 trillion into building houses. Yet remarkably few new ideas resulted, say some of the nation's leading architects. "It seems a lot of the innovation wasn't in how houses were built or how they look or function," says architect Tom Kundig. "Instead the novelty was in financing." And Marianne Cusato adds, "The 'more is more' mentality took over.... Developers attempted to differentiate by building a small town in your house...a media room, a caf&eacute;, a hair salon."

Still, some designers triumphed. They made some homes smaller, with movable exterior walls to encourage residents to spend more time outdoors. Glass walls allowed occupants to feel they were floating on treetops. More homes incorporated recycled materials, wind and geothermal energy, and architects used new digital technology.

The Wall Street Journal talked to 15 experts, including leading architects and the chief curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art, to assemble a list of the five most influential and inspiring houses produced during the housing boom. Here they are:

1. MAISON &Agrave; BORDEAUX, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Bordeaux, France, 1998

The panel's clear favorite. Architect Rem Koolhaas inverted the traditional concept of a wheelchair-accessible home for a client who was partly paralyzed in a car accident. Set on a hill in France's Bordeaux region, the 5,300-square-foot home was conceived as three stacked houses. At the center of the structure is a large mechanical lift that ascends all three levels -- none is complete without the platform.

If You Lived There

What it's like to buy and own a home in the top houses' communities:

1. Bordeaux, a city of about 230,000 in France's southwest, gave its name to one of the country's most famous wine regions, and foreigners have been buying up wineries. A renovated four-bedroom loft in the city can cost &euro;1 million (about $1.4 million).

2. Kenoza Lake is in western Sullivan County, about a two-hour drive north from New York City and popular with second-home owners. Houses generally cost between $150,000 and $350,000. Close by is the new Bethel Woods Center for the Arts (acts have included the Jonas Brothers and Rascal Flatts).

3. Golf courses and ranches abound in Tubac, Ariz., a second-home community about 50 miles south of Tucson. Semi-custom homes in recently built subdivisions sell for roughly $350,000 to $750,000, with eco-friendly materials a popular choice.

4. Geyserville, about 75 miles north of San Francisco, is near the better-known second-home town of Healdsburg in northern Sonoma County, a developing wine destination. Prices range from $140,000 for a town home to $500,000 for a three-bedroom single-family house in good condition.

5. Nearby Mount Fuji is a towering presence in Shizuoka, Japan, about 110 miles southwest of Tokyo, where a moderate climate has made the area a big producer of orange and green tea. A typical house of 1,075 square feet on land of 1,400 square feet would fetch about $363,000.

-- Christina S.N. Lewis and Miho Inada

"They asked us to do a house which would not visibly remind anyone, including themselves, of his condition," Mr. Koolhaas says. "We interpreted the house as an extension of everything he could still do, rather than to compensate for everything he could no longer do." Maison &agrave; Bordeaux "challenges everyday notions about how you move in and around a house," says New York architect Annabelle Selldorf.

2. VilLA NM, UNStudio, Kenoza Lake, N.Y., 2007

Software advances let architects create new kinds of spaces in homes. VilLA NM, by architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "takes the glass box and ties it in a kind of spatial knot," says Thomas Hanrahan, dean of the Pratt Institute's School of Architecture. "It's a test case as to what's possible when you apply the computer to architecture." Rather than coming together at right angles, walls curve together like skin around an exoskeleton. A fire destroyed the 3,200-square-foot house in February, but it remains a favorite.

3. TYLER HOUSE, Rick Joy Architects, Tubac, Ariz., 2000

With its reinforced concrete walls and rusty corrugated-iron rooftops, the Tyler House stands in a desert 50 miles south of Tucson. Architect Rick Joy is admired for his use of local materials such as rusted metal, adobe and rammed earth (compressed sand, clay and gravel) to help relate his modernism to the arid region. The 2,700-square-foot house "evokes the theme of a rusty shelter in a cowboy camp," says Columbia University Architecture Professor Kenneth Frampton. "There's a strong attempt to inflect the houses according to the region they are in."

4. VISITING ARTISTS HOUSE, Jim Jennings Architecture, Geyserville, Calif., 2003

Two nearly parallel, 200-foot-long concrete walls slice into the crest of a hill, defining the 1,700-square-foot residence of two suites and artists' studios. Built on a former sheep ranch that now contains a sculpture garden, the retreat is considered a prime example of a small private rural house standing over a dramatic landscape -- a common juxtaposition architects explored during this period. "It's concrete. It's extremely simple. It fits into the site," says Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne.

5. PICTURE WINDOW HOUSE, Shigeru Ban Architects, Shizuoka, Japan, 2002

Architect Shigeru Ban captures panoramic ocean views by turning the building itself into a frame. The bottom floor is a wide rectangular box open to the elements, while the living quarters upstairs are contained by floor-to-ceiling glass. "It's bold. There's a hole in the house that is functioning as a window, and then there's this vast window within the house itself," says New York architect Deborah Berke. "It's a little richer for me than his other work because it has multiple takes on the picture window."

The Judges: Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern of Art; Denise Scott Brown, principal, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates; Deborah Berke, principal, Deborah Berke & Partners Architects; Marianne Cusato, principal, Marianne Cusato Associates; Kenneth Frampton, professor of architecture, Columbia University; Thomas Hanrahan, dean of the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute; Gisue Hariri, principal, Hariri & Hariri Architecture; Steven Holl, principal, Steven Holl Architects; Robert Ivy, editor in chief, Architectural Record; Karrie Jacobs, founding editor in chief, Dwell Magazine; Michelle Kaufman, founder, Michelle Kaufmann Designs; Tom Kundig, principal, Olsen Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects; Thom Mayne, principal, mOrphosis Architects; Annabelle Selldorf, principal, Selldorf Architects; Jennifer Siegal, principal, Office of Mobile Design

Write to Sara Lin at

Corrections & Amplifications
Deborah Berke & Partners Architects was among the judges who picked the five most remarkable homes of the past decade for this article. The article misspelled her name as Burke.

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