There are few mental images that conjure up as much peace of mind as those of a minimalist home. Refined yet livable and completely devoid of unwanted clutter, minimalist living spaces are often refuges from the demands of everyday life. Their hallmark attributes—pared down color palettes, clean lines, and a frequent reliance on natural materials—are often employed to deft effect by interior designers who are committed to this seemingly simple aesthetic. Below, from a New York City condo to a modern home in Morocco, we share nine of the best minimalist homes to be featured by AD.
A sake-inspired beach house in Fire Island
Looking around fashion designer Derek Lam’s waterfront home, one doesn’t immediately think of sipping sake. But that was key to the inspiration he shared with architect and interior designer Neal Beckstedt when they began working on this project together. Of course, Derek Lam being Derek Lam—a womenswear star known for combining elegant simplicity and exquisite detailing—didn’t want just any sake. “In the beginning, I told Neal that my favorite drink was this sake at [the New York City restaurant] Omen that they serve in a cedar box. It’s perfectly simple, and it has this beautiful cedar smell when you drink it,” Lam recalls. “I said, ‘Neal, I just want to live inside that sake box.’”
Ask and ye shall receive.
Now, Lam lives in the cedar sake box of his dreams. Together with his husband, Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann—founder of Italian fashion brand Callas Milano—and their Irish terrier, Roscoe, he’s made the most of the serene home’s 2,000 square feet of minimalist and modernist space—all of it considerably more comfortable and cozy than it might have been thanks to Beckstedt’s carefully thought-out use of warm and natural materials and sculptural accents. —Andrew Sessa
A stunning farmhouse in upstate New York
Beverly Kerzner first met architect and designer Niels Schoenfelder over 20 years ago. At the time, he was 24 years old and had already built a stunning hotel in Pondicherry, India, that caught her eye. After tracking him down and initiating a fruitful conversation, she tapped him to build her dream home.
“Right from the start, Niels and I pushed each other. It was always a conversation, or a lengthy debate, getting to know the land,” Kerzner says. She spent years perfecting her vision with the young German architect.
Fast-forward to 2017 when she purchased a vast plot of scenic land in the Hudson Valley. The sprawling hill-scape contained two stunning barn structures, a river that runs through the property, a cabin, and a residential home. Just like in the far off regions near Pondicherry, this was a landscape that had to be appreciated, worked with, and understood. “I knew immediately Niels was the one for the job,” she recalls. The finished result is a grand yet subtle structure that allows its surrounding environment to take control. —Sophia Herring
A modernist homage in New Canaan, Connecticut
AD100 architect Deborah Berke remembers the first time she set foot on the land. “It was inspirational,” she recounts of the site: a verdant eight-acre swath of New Canaan, Connecticut, with thick woods, a gentle grade, and a picturesque pond. “I am a New Englander by heritage, and that quintessential landscape of big trees and water really speaks to me.” At the time, the current dean of the Yale School of Architecture had been approached by the property’s owners to build an auxiliary pavilion to their main house—someplace for guests to sleep or for themselves to use as a retreat. “The impulse was a light touch so that nature felt most present.”
Through careful siting, ingenuity of fenestration, and other tricks of transition, Berke crafted a nuanced sequence that delays gratification, introducing the scenic surrounds in one spectacular sweep. When guests arrive they are greeted by a seemingly monolithic expanse of gray brick, its staggered façade concealing the entrance. The gravel motor court, however, gives way to a dashed line of rectilinear pavers that unfold beneath a simple black metal trellis, beckoning visitors. (“That trellis says come here,” Berke jokes.) Step through the door, turn the corner, and you are greeted by a panorama of window walls that frame the sylvan vista. “Before you enter, you don’t quite know what’s going to be revealed,” she notes. “Only inside do you feel where you are.”
The overall identity speaks to what Berke calls “the trajectory of classic modernism in New England.” It was in this corner of Connecticut, after all, that midcentury trailblazers such as Eliot Noyes, Marcel Breuer, and Philip Johnson reinvented the image of American domesticity, one glass-wall abode at a time. With its taught volume, limited materials palette, and engagement with the landscape, Berke’s pavilion builds on that tradition. —Sam Cochran
A low-tech home just outside Lake Tahoe
As the CEO of Five9, a publicly traded cloud software company, Rowan Trollope knows a thing or two about technology. Considering his role creating cutting edge technologies, one might believe that his new Lake Tahoe home would look like something out of The Jetsons. But if cartoon analogies are to be made, the 50-year-old entrepreneur’s home—which features slabs of stone floors and wood ceilings—would fit more seamlessly into an episode of The Flintstones. “In general, we really stayed away from technology in the house,” Trollope admits. Instead, he and his wife Stephanie, along with their two young children (their third is out of the house), sought to create a space that blurred the line between indoor and outdoor living. “We wanted our home to not be on the land, but of it,” Trollope continues, “which is why it’s partially built into a slope in the ground.”
Located in Truckee, California (roughly ten miles from Lake Tahoe), the one-acre property was purchased by the Trollopes in 2018. By March of 2020, construction was complete, allowing the family to temporarily move out of their primary San Francisco residence and into the house just as the pandemic hit. “The new home became our sanctuary during the pandemic,” Trollope says. “It has that feel of being quite isolated, which I like because my daily life is typically filled with people, meetings, noise. But this house was designed to be the opposite of that in every way.” In order to fit their utopian vision, Trollope tapped the California-based firm Faulkner Architects. “There is minimal difference in material deployment inside and out [of the home],” explains the firm’s founder Greg Faulkner. “I wanted to evoke feelings of a backcountry trip, the spirit of escape and discovery that rises upon arrival of somewhere uniquely special. These feelings are crucial in connecting with a space.”
If connecting with the space was important, then that meant that finding the right interior designer was paramount. That’s why Trollope brought in the San Francisco–based designer Nicole Hollis. “For anyone who steps foot in the home, they would immediately sense that a lot of inspiration came from Donald Judd,” Hollis says, referring to the sleek minimalism prevalent throughout the space. But it was evident the team—and the homeowners—pushed for more than just a Judd-like ambiance. —Nick Mafi
Isolated digs in Marfa, Texas
“It was the only made structure as far as the eye could see, so it became the pivot point by which we designed everything else,” Bob Harris, partner at Lake Flato architects, says of an old water cistern on the approximately 700-acre ranch his clients purchased just outside of Marfa, Texas. “It is this symbol of people that survived in the past and made their livelihoods there in a harsh environment. You want to build upon that, which is what we decided to do.”
But initially, this idea was sold to clients who did not end up building the house that the Texan firm designed for them. The clients in question decided that the location was a bit removed from the proverbial action of the art-world mecca, which houses just under 2,000 full-time residents. Ultimately, they decided to sell their land to Ashlyn and Dan Perry, a couple who met when both were living in San Antonio but are now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In an unusual turn of events, the Perrys, philanthropists with a long history of charitable work in the arts, decided to green-light the rammed-earth structures that Lake Flato had designed for the previous land owners, rather than do what many others would have: Start from scratch and potentially with different architects.
In total, eight structures were constructed using this method, and each is its own room for the most part. They include a mechanical room, an office, a gym, a guest suite, a guest wing, an art studio, a combination kitchen, a living and dining area, and the primary bedroom suite. The structures are set around a courtyard, connected by a covered porch above and breezeways below, which are also used to access each room, as they’re not interconnected. With its low profile and use of natural materials from the earth, the completed home stays true to the architect’s intention to “create a home that has been inserted into the untouched desert landscape without disturbance… It almost feels like a natural part of the desert itself.” —Rima Suqi
A midcentury gem in LA
Before Joachim Rønning’s film Kon-Tiki was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award, before he directed the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, even before he married the activist Amanda Hearst, the Norwegian-born director had set his sights on a very different career path. “I was in my late teens when I first came across John Lautner’s work in a coffee table book and it completely fascinated me,” Rønning says. “In fact I was so taken by his designs that before I was bitten by the movie bug, I was thinking of becoming an architect.” It would take a few more decades before Rønning and his wife would come across Lautner’s work again, but this time, it would be to buy a home the influential architect had designed.
In 1961, John Lautner designed the West Hollywood home for interior designer and concert pianist Marco Wolff. For Lautner, who had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s, the home was an opportunity to flex his creative muscles. What began as an arduous, almost vertical plot of land, resulted in perhaps the acme of midcentury-modern residential architecture on the West Coast. With this home, Lautner leaned into the primal state of nature, demanding that his audience turn their preconceived notion of domesticity on its head. It was a bold statement of how humans once lived—among the trees, the rocks, perched atop a hill—and the architect stamped his thumbprint on it. When Rønning and Hearst Rønning purchased the property, they tapped architect and interior designer Clive Wilkinson to help bring their new home back to its former glory. —Nick Mafi
Indoor-outdoor living in Casablanca, Morocco
It’s not every day that a message on Facebook leads to an incredible redesign of a home, but that was indeed the case for architect and interior designer Crina Arghirescu Rogard. “The owners of this Casablanca villa gave me carte blanche to do a total gut renovation, inside and outside,” she says. And though the bones of the house were very modernist, the clients loved Arghirescu Rogard’s work so much that they were open to everything she proposed.
“I’m a contextual architect, so I like to keep in mind the environment where the project is found,” Arghirescu Rogard says. “[But] the clients wanted an unconventional space in respect to Moroccan culture—they wanted to take some of the formal elements out of the traditional settings.” In order to achieve this, Arghirescu Rogard was able to reconfigure the layout of both floors of the home and redesign the enclosed areas to generate a seamless flow. “The goal was to open the house to the exterior by taking down walls and positioning tall windows in places that could offer different layers of transparencies. And create unexpected perspectives and vistas to cut through the house without revealing it in its entirety,” she adds. “For example, the olive tree behind the glass façade becomes a backdrop for the sculptural staircase—the beating heart of the house—that itself protects the living room’s privacy while allowing a warming flow of light and air.” —Zoë Sessums
An unexpectedly earthy New York City condo
When the interior designer Sebastian Zuchowicki began working with his client on his New York City residence, the starting point was the living room. “I feel like the living room concepts are always the soul of the space, especially in a New York City apartment, and then it trickles down,” he says.
Compared to his client’s conventional summer house in Rhode Island, the three-bedroom apartment in West Chelsea that he currently shares with his two children (and their cat) is a modern sanctuary with a finely tuned aesthetic. Zuchowicki spent a whole year slowly transforming the 3,000-square-foot condominium one room at a time, until the bedrooms, dining room, and newly fashioned private library had been completely perfected.
“My favorite detail is that there’s texture everywhere you look,” Zuchowicki says. “Literally everywhere you look, there’s texture. You won’t see a white wall anywhere, and that to me makes it feel special. It doesn’t feel heavy, and that was really important. I wanted it to feel light but super textured.” —Sydney Gore
A Boston town house with space to lounge
A client who literally refuses to take no for an answer may sound less than ideal, but for the team at Boston’s Hacin + Associates, one such energetic and creative collaborator’s approach led to aesthetic magic and joy. “Truly, I would describe her—we all would—as a dream client,” lead interior designer Matthew Woodward says. “I’ve never had more fun on a project in my life.”
When Robin Nelson-Rice and her husband, Derica Rice, decided to move from suburban Indiana to Boston, their real estate broker and general contractor both felt H+A was the perfect match to reimagine a six-story 1881 Back Bay town house. However, founding principal and creative director David Hacin found himself quite busy at the time. “Robin looked at me right in the eye and said, ‘You don’t understand. You are going to be doing this project.’ And I actually loved that,” Hacin says. “As we were talking, we clicked, we connected, and that was it for her. She wanted to keep going with that process.”
“We made decisions wholeheartedly based on viewing the space as a gallery for contemporary Black artists,” Woodward says. “Robin was really thrilled to do that. Early on, we were conscious of showing restraint in the materials palette, so we could really let the art stand out.” The dining room in particular was designed around a Russell Young portrait of Barack Obama, a piece Nelson-Rice says, “speaks volumes—it’s peaceful, it’s hopeful, it’s positive.” —Kathryn Romeyn
