Urban dwellings can feel highly compartmentalized, composed of segregated levels.

When music executive Joe Galante retired from his post as chairman of Sony Music Nashville in 2010, he and his wife, Phran, were ready to shed their frenetic, high-profile lifestyle.

“I am interested in the idea of an ‘essential architecture’ in the tropics,” says Panama City–based architect Patrick Dillon, who was born to American parents and raised in the Canal Zone.

When New York firm Hariri & Hariri unveiled a design for a futuristic residence they called the Digital House in 1998, it caused a stir.

The Delaware River’s East Branch, meandering through New York’s Catskills region, is famous for fly fishing. So, when Gad Soffer—a passionate amateur fly fisherman—got the chance to purchase a pristine nine-acre parcel there, he and his wife, Katie Donnelly, leapt for it.

When Seattle-based designer John Van Dyke visited Cabo Corrientes for the first time nearly a decade ago, he found a kind of place he thought no longer existed.