If you ask Georg Kratzenstein, project architect for Frankfurt, Germany based Meixner Schlueter Wendt Architects, to describe the house his firm designed for a family of five in the town of Kronberg im Taunus, he will tell you it’s a “completely normal, pitched-roof house, built on a slope, where the mass of the garden floor has been subtracted.”

Simple, serene, calm, safe. Not the usual terms used to describe living spaces in New York City, but those are the words chosen by at least one half of the couple renting the West Village carriage house owned by photographer Jan Staller, and designed by New York City–based firm Christoff:Finio Architecture.

Ask Biloxi, Mississippi resident Richard Tyler what he thinks of his house, designed by architect Marlon Blackwell, AIA, and he seems a little shocked at the question. “I love my house,” he says without a moment’s hesitation, “it’s home, you know what I’m saying?”

Talking to 27-year-old architect Jayna Cooper about the house she designed and built for herself on busy La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, you’d think it all came about through luck and happenstance. But, as someone smart once said, luck is no accident.

With perhaps the exception of the architecture of the Machine Age, buildings across history have collaborated with nature. Tara and its southern kin wouldn’t sport generous porches if their makers hadn’t recognized the need to deflect direct sunlight from interiors.