“I’m happy with my wife,” says Dutch architect Wiel Arets, “because we are comfortable together and yet she still challenges me.

With Chile’s capital, Santiago, a two-hour drive away, and the vibrant seaport city of Valparaiso just down the coast, the onetime shipping village of Zapallar has become a chic resort destination.

As neighborhoods go, New York City’s Midtown West (aka Clinton or Hell’s Kitchen) is a microcosm of the city itself.

The Northern Liberties neighborhood, just north of Center City in Philadelphia, used to be a decrepit Rust Belt remnant, but it now attracts the artist crowd.

The house that architect Eero Saarinen completed in 1957 for J. Irwin Miller and his family in Columbus, Indiana, easily qualifies as a paragon of residential midcentury Modernism.

Alex de Rijke, founding director of dRMM Architects in London, and his client for the Sliding House hadn’t seen each other since their days as schoolmates and teenage motorcycle enthusiasts.

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?”