Japanese architects mtka found a creative compromise while renovating a 20-year-old single family home in the Kodaira neighborhood of Tokyo. The ground floor contains the bedrooms and bathroom, while the upper floor is a completely open-plan living space. The new owners, a couple with two children, felt like they could use a little more room for the kids to play.

With its sloping roof, the home didn’t have enough ceiling height for a full third floor, and adding a conventional loft on the higher side would have cut off natural light to the rest of the space. The design team’s workaround is pretty brilliant. As they put it, they changed the flow of the house with a “maximal ellipse,” a mezzanine level with a giant oval cutout that maintains the spacious feel of the high ceilings while creating a new inhabitable surface.

This new level is almost flush with the lower side of the ceiling, but provides 5.9 feet (1.8 meters) of head space on the higher side, just enough for the inhabitants to stand up. Not only does its unusual shape help keep the south wall of windows open to the rest of the living area, but it also provides structural support. On the higher side of the home, it’s a loft; on the lower side, it’s a shelf.

“By putting a single maximal object in this large studio, I thought of updating the flow of people, the flow of power, the flow of wind, and the flow of lights and creating an architecture suitable for a new family,” says mtka co-founder Murayama Toru. “Therefore, a super-elliptical perforated ceiling was inserted at a level of 1.8 meters in the horizontal material of the south window. Since the center of gravity of the space is based on the south side, the center of gravity of the living room, which had no base, was pulled to the center, creating various places around the ellipse.”

“The ceiling is neither as thick as a wooden floor, nor as thin as a suspended ceiling. [Built] from an existing wooden construction, it is an autonomous and substantial object. And the oval stairwell is empty without any substance. Standing on the floor of the living room on the second floor, the edge of the ceiling, with a thickness of 101 millimeters and a height of 1.8 meters, is recognized as a single endless line, which makes it look like a large horizon.”

Building codes in many countries would at least require a safety railing around the opening, eliminating the ability to sit at the edge, but it’s still doable. The elliptical opening gives the home some visual interest by incorporating a rounded shape within an otherwise rectilinear box, but it always avoids overpowering the rest of the space.

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In the decades after World War II, many of the older terrace houses were demolished to make way for denser tower blocks, but today, municipalities and private owners are working hard to preserve them. Not only do the quality and lifespan of the original materials used to build these beauties help them last longer than some modern structures, but they’re historically significant, too. One cool trend in updating London terrace houses is the affixing of a glass extension to their rears, by which their interiors are expanded without significantly altering their facades.

As far as the British firm Guarnieri Architects was concerned, a sleek glazed box was just what this Victorian terrace in Clapham Common called for, acting as a light well to flood the interiors with daylight while providing extra room for a newly-altered floor plan. Namely, the clients requested that a new floor be excavated below ground level to create space for wellness facilities, including a steam room, hot tub, and swimming pool. The extension also made room for a few larger open-plan areas.

The architects altered the existing split-level arrangement and added the glass box to accommodate these amenities. A new mezzanine level projects a dining area out into the glassed-in space, resting just above the swimming pool. Both look out onto the back garden, newly hardscaped and walled in by wood and a lush ivy-covered wall at the rear. A ficus tree grows in an oversized pot inside the glazed box, stretching up past the floor of the mezzanine.

Inside, minimalist finishes in white, pale wood, and marble make the space seem larger than its limited 18-foot width. The architects relocated the home’s internal staircases to accommodate the new open-plan layout. The space around the pool, however, is finished in a dark gray slate for cavernous vibes. The stone in these areas is also porous, which allows it to withstand all the moisture produced by the new spa features.

For Marco Guarnieri, the firm’s lead architect, achieving a sense of lightness in the glazed extension was a top priority. The design team sought assistance from structural engineers to construct the box with minimal steel reinforcement in order to enhance its crystalline nature, providing an uninterrupted visual connection to the outdoors.

“We think that the project can be generalized as the alteration of the common 19th century typology, conceived as series of small rooms, by removing rather than adding, to create the open spaces typical of our time contemporary domestic living,” say the architects. “We like to call our project a Victorian Remix, like a DJ rearranging old records into a contemporary music performance.”

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In the stunning Fanad Peninsula in Ireland, this traditional home was revamped with a garage that became a studio and a new structure that would become both a boatshed and a lovely new enclosed courtyard.

MacGabhann Architects took on the Drumnacraig House project in 2011 and made the previously-small cottage in a larger, natural-looking, more modern abode.

The new addition is clad entirely in Western Red Cedar, visually separating it from the original structure. The use of this natural material also ties the home in to its lovely natural surroundings.

The addition’s roof slopes upward to mimic the surrounding landscape, raising up to meet the rocky but tree-filled terrain surrounding the home.

A new mezzanine level in the studio addition features enormous windows which allow for a view of the nearby sea. This sloped addition also provides a measure of privacy and protection for the patio behind the home.

The new boatshed is located a short distance away from the main home and is connected by a glass-enclosed sunroom. The sunroom provides entrances for the home and the shed as well as giving the residents a place to sit comfortably to enjoy the view while sheltering themselves from the sometimes-fickle Irish weather.

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In the Spanish town of A Coruña, OCO Studio built a spacious sun-filled home. With the liberal use of glass and open space, the home’s visual space is increased tremendously. From the street, the stone house looks traditional, much like the homes that surround it. The interior, however, is more modern, spacious and flexible enough that it could be used as a family home or a mixed-use residential and studio space.

The home’s open plan allows light to enter from all directions and to pass through the house at all angles. The stairs have no risers to allow more light to penetrate the interior of the home.

The public areas of the home appear to have double height thanks to the strategic placement of skylights and an open glass mezzanine. Stone walls add rustic charm to the otherwise-modern interior. But a modern slate wall opposite the fireplace – complete with randomly placed circular cutouts – blends with that rustic element and acts as another means for light to freely flow through the home.

Part of the floor in the main living area is composed of laminated glass. This allows light to pass freely down to the ground level. This level is home to a large storage area with lighted opaque glass and a beautifully bright polished stone floor.

The very top level houses an open mezzanine with a spacious slanted ceiling. The skylights in the home’s roof and the high mezzanine windows connect the main level of the home and the mezzanine, with light passing through the glass dividing wall and down into the living area.

“It is a house between medians, low plus a floor and undercover, in which the section is considered the fundamental element for the configuration of the space, although it was already in the configuration prior to this rehabilitation. That is, the spatial structure of the pre-existing building is maintained almost entirely, but double-height spaces are created, free heights are corrected, spaces are cleaned and an axis of natural light is created that crosses the housing in its main body from east to west, from the access doors and through the staircase. Which does not have risers to promote this visual axis.”

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Some designers are foiled by small budgets and confined contexts. Others take the limitations of site and funding as a challenge and make incredible architecture out of difficult circumstances, such as Monolab did with this impressive urban townhouse design which is stunning from virtually any angle.

Filled with unique and angular lines and spaces there is no single viewpoint from which one can fully appreciate this home, from outside or within. Sleeping and bathing spaces are situated in central concrete node surrounded by open spaces for living, cooking and dining – but the house is as much about circulation as it is about staying in one place.

In some ways, this house can be best (or only) really understood via drawings and architectural models which illustrate the design process and the intended hierarchies of space and structure, solid and void within the overall plan – but perhaps this layer of complexity is a happy accident adding to its mystery.

The interplay of open spaces, closed volumes, exposed structure and sleek white walls and surfaces combines to make for an incredibly spacious, connected but also diverse experience for people throughout the urban townhouse – one would never guess what ordinary structures sit on either side of it from inside.

On the outside, the house has a remarkable and distinctive facade but nonetheless also has elements (such as height and scale) that make it seem somehow contextual despite the odd angles that converge into a glowing eye above street level.

From the architects: “The Body House is an urban stack of three small projects. Below and on top are two extremely opposite housing concepts. Below is the fixed, interiorized, dark, heavy, robust, concrete socle. On top is the roof terrace as ‘campsite’ with a free, open, light, flexible, flimsy, nylon tent. In-between is the big living space with the body, a volume inside a second envelope, a concept that normally is to be found in big buildings.”

“The wire frame grew during the design process and connected to the plinth and the roof. Since the wire frame contained program it is covered by a skin. It became something like a mass, a body, a caged predator. We shaped it to upgrade the qualities of the void around. It has been cut like a rough diamond to avoid curved, expensive surfaces and because blobs are non critical. The result is a faceted body of which parts are covered with different types of skin: metal grill, glass, particle sheet with epoxy coating and synthetic fabric.”

“The body contains the kitchen/dining space, however it also absorbs functions that in a loose lay-out would disrupt the open character of the living space, like trajectories for cables, pipes and ducts, heating and ventilation systems, the toilets and the bathroom. It takes care of infrastructure and moving patterns by four stairs, partly visible, partly secret and is the connector of plinth, roof and living. The body has made contact with the outside world by four wooden devices: a pivoting facade slab which serves as the entry with the letters ‘use’ of ‘body house’, a flipping door towards the patio, a tilting plank towards the terrace on top of the patio and a shifting plateau to the roof.”

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