“To me, the facade of a building is like the first sentence of a novel — it sets the tone, the mood, and hints at what’s to come,” says German architect Alexis Dornier of Alexis Dornier Makings.
When designing a house, the primary consideration is most often how the owners will live and occupy the space inside. But for many architects, the front elevation is also a compelling plane for experimentation. Increasingly they are using it not just as a decorative flourish, a charismatic facade for those looking in, but also to raise the bar for personalised design, and to tackle some of the practical and climate-related challenges of our times in new ways.
For Flow House, a project in Bali, Dornier responded to the musician client’s request for a “calm” property by creating an undulating architectural facade that mimicked the shape of a sound wave. The vast curving glass front is met by a sharply dipping, parabolic roof. The curves of the wood-clad ceiling it creates inside improve the acoustics of the home, which is now used as a base for artists’ residencies and includes a recording studio.
While constructed mostly from concrete, the architect wanted the residents to feel like they were connected with their surroundings. Swaths of glass provide panoramic views of the rural setting, the master bedroom has its own private garden with an outdoor shower, and the first-floor mezzanine swoops down to meet a conically shaped staircase, almost flowing to the pool below and the rice paddies beyond. It is part of the Pennjiwann community near Ubud, a small group of homes blending “minimalistic avant-garde” and “classic Balinese” style.
While Flow House is situated among fields and coconut trees — an open space where its possible to set the architectural tone — the rippling Canvas House in Toronto, Canada, sits between the large early-20th-century Georgian and French Colonial-style homes of the Forest Hill neighbourhood. Completed in 2022, the result enlivens a residential street in an area where the people are “open to architectural dialogue and evolution”, says its creator Alex Josephson, co-founder of architectural studio Partisans. “This house acts as both foil and focal point, balancing boldness with contextual sensitivity.”
The client, an art collector with a background in theatre production, “desired a home as a personal expression”, says Josephson, so he took inspiration from American abstract artist Larry Poons’s dot paintings when creating the masonry pattern. Meanwhile, the “rhythmic facade”, as the architect describes it, is a randomised pattern “arranged like the motions of a theatre drape”. Inside, in contrast, the smooth, clean white interiors serve as a simple background for the client’s collection. The resulting home mimics the size of the detached houses beside it, and similarly keeps the suburban lawn and driveway — but with its single window, and wrapped with a rounded and bulging pixelated pattern of bricks, it seems like an alien among them.
Other projects that boldly juxtapose with their surroundings include Atelier Itch’s 2024 Bomun House, a shining monolith among the crowded dark brick buildings of a narrow Seoul alleyway. Corrugated, lightweight steel wraps around the narrow, four-storey home’s external, road-facing staircase, creating a clean and commanding exterior. The facade appears windowless but lets light in while providing privacy, and extends upwards to fence the rooftop terrace.
Maison KN by Nghia Architect, meanwhile, is a tall red structure characterised by a patchwork of solid and barred squares in the historic centre of Hanoi, Vietnam. Built for two siblings and completed in 2023, it was designed so that it could later be reconfigured to accommodate their two separate families. Extending over seven floors, the facade also extends to act as both a ground-floor courtyard and a third-floor garden, providing ventilation but also ensuring privacy in the crowded neighbourhood. “We were initially keen to dial down the boldness of the exterior,” say the owners, but “the architects’ vision of the house being a ‘sculpture’ stood out.”
Such new buildings can spark an interesting dialogue with the surrounding architecture. State of Kin’s Brick House, in the Mount Lawley suburb of Perth, Australia, was built in 2019 from red bricks salvaged from historic Federation-style homes that had been demolished nearby. This reuse of local material was an attempt to respect both heritage and sustainability. “We see it as a conversation with its surroundings and the residents,” says Ara Salomone, director of architecture at State of Kin.
While constructed from traditional materials, with a classically shaped pediment above the driveway, the rest is a joyful jumble of shapes, with both square and porthole-like round windows, and a jagged, sawtooth roof that references traditional factory buildings. The playful spirit continues inside with a net hammock suspended over the living space. “It doesn’t shy away from being bold, but it’s also deeply rooted in place,” says Salomone.
“The use of reclaimed red brick allowed us to craft an exterior that’s richly textured and layered, one that [plays with] light, shadow and time,” adds Salomone, who created interiors that also feature exposed brick throughout, including a cellar with a herringbone ceiling. “Every curve and angle was carefully considered to create rhythm and depth.”
With a similar nod to local history, “facadism” sees the architecturally notable street-facing walls of homes preserved, while the building behind is demolished to make way for a modern construction. But in Bengaluru, India, AJ Architects has played with the practice. Recently tasked with modernising a dated brick and render villa on the busy Mahatma Gandhi Road, they reconfigured the interior and added three dynamic, curved sail-like structures to the exterior, embedded with lights to create a glowing silhouette at night. Constructed from tensile fabric on a tubular steel frame, these decorative elements offered more than a facelift, says founder Arvind Jain. The three structures are “camouflaging the existing structure from the harsh west-facing sun by creating an air gap between the brick walls and the fabric facade, which also helps reduce energy consumption.”
Adapting facades to better cope with climate change is an active preoccupation. Non-structural curtain walls, made from glass or other lightweight materials, can act to protect a building from the elements. Using sensors, kinetic facades can automatically move into place to shield a building as the weather changes.
In Leiria, Portugal, Didier Fiúza Faustino of Bureau des Mésarchitectures took an imaginative approach to the particular challenge of protecting the residents of the 2024 Martires Housing Complex from the baking sun. “Due to the total area of the site and the urban regulations, the apartments could not have balconies,” says Fiúza Faustino. Instead, the seven flats, located in a semicircular building whose shape mirrors the roundabout beside it, were fitted with vast windows. To combat the heat trap, Fiuza Faustino designed a carapace of golden shutters and sandy precast concrete, coloured to complement the traditional yellow-painted exterior of the adjoining house (the area is under a heritage preservation rule). “By playing with the aluminium shutters, [residents] remain the masters of their home and are able to give their interior space more intimacy,” he says.
“It’s all about using honest, tactile and enduring materials — like brick, timber and steel — not just for their visual qualities, but for the way they age and evolve over time,” says Salomone.
But as more homeowners engage with their exteriors in dynamic ways, creative alternatives are shaking up the path ahead. Bioplastic 3D-printed curtain walls, sculptural photovoltaic skins and data-responsive surfaces are being developed. Some radical new faces await.
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