TOP 10 private houses of 2025

designboom’s top 10 private spaces of 2025

In 2025, architects around the world continue to expand the possibilities of domestic design, presenting a diverse collection of private houses that reconsider how we inhabit landscape, community, and climate. This year’s selection ranges from net-positive, off-grid experimentation in rural Japan to rammed-earth dwellings carved into the terrain of Crete, revealing a field increasingly attuned to resourcefulness, site specificity, and the choreography of indoor–outdoor living.

Shared themes emerge across these works — some occupying their natural context gently, others defined by a bold sculptural form. Florian Busch Architects pioneers an energy-generating modular residence amid agricultural fields in Hokkaido, while Wallmakers suspends a thatched, occupiable bridge over a gorge in India. Social frameworks also come to the fore, with TEN’s collaborative housing for women in Bosnia-Herzegovina proposing new models of care-based living. Explore designboom’s top 10 private houses of 2025 below!

arthur casas builds his own house in the forest of brazil

Hidden within the dense greenery of Brazil’s Atlantic forest, the Iporanga House stands as architect Arthur Casas’s own retreat. Conceived as a place to ‘recharge his energies,’ the home sits lightly in a protected natural reserve along the São Paulo coast. Its design is guided by a desire for harmony with the surrounding vegetation, a goal demonstrated by wood cladding that blends with the forest’s shifting tones and textures.

The plan takes the form of two symmetrical cubes framing a lofty central volume. Inside, lofty ceilings rise 11 meters (36 feet), and continuous glass panels draw in light and views, creating a breezy and fluid connection to the trees beyond. ‘The shape is simple, symmetrical, easy,’ Casas notes. He contrasts the home’s subdued form with with the ‘entropic, messy profile’ of the forest that surrounds it.

image © Fernando Guerra

florian busch architects’ modular ‘house W’ generates more energy than it consumes

mykonos architects embeds wedge-shaped n’arrow house into terrain of crete

Set to be carved into the olive-dotted hills of Crete, Mykonos Architects designs a home titled N’Arrow to respond directly to the steep topography and slender dimensions of its site. The underground, rammed-earth project is designed to avoid imposition, and instead works with the natural contours of the land, inviting the surrounding environment to shape its form. Olive groves and rolling terrain are not backdrops but rooftops, and but co-authors in the architectural narrative, pushing the residential space toward harmony rather than dominance.

A fifteen-meter setback regulation, typically a limiting factor, sparked the defining concept behind N’Arrow. Mykonos Architects saw not a constraint but a creative opportunity, transforming the elongated form of the plot into a narrow, wedge-like structure that nestles into the hillside. This bold, linear geometry sets the tone for the home’s identity, drawing attention to the power of architectural adaptation when guided by site-specific conditions.

wallmakers wraps its suspended ‘bridge house’ in skin of thatched scales

ring-shaped home by alexis dornier encircles central garden in bali

fran silvestre-designed villa zig-zags across the southern spanish landscape

Fran Silvestre Arquitectos designs Villa 95 as part of the real estate developer Cork Oak Mansion project in Sotogrande, crafting a residence that appears to glide across the southern Spanish landscape. Defined by a continuous architectural gesture, the three-story villa unfurls along a sharp diagonal, its elongated form maximizing the buildable area of the 2,317 square meter plot while framing views of Altos de Valderrama area. Developed by DUS Desarrollos Inmobiliarios, the house is part of an exclusive collection of six high-end villas.

curved green roof shields wiki world’s wooden ‘cabin of palette’ in wuhan

nendo weaves six cottages together with ‘hand-holding’ roofs in japanese forest house

arquitectura-G embeds blue concrete core with spiraling staircase in portuguese residence

In Sintra, Portugal, Arquitectura-G completes House II, the latest intervention within a long-abandoned quinta de recreio, a rural estate historically devoted to agriculture and leisure. The project forms part of an ongoing sequence of works by the studio’s team, which seeks to conserve and rehabilitate the site’s buildings and reactivate the broader territory.

Strict regulations limited any change to the building’s external profile, facades, or roof, so Arquitectura-G responded by hollowing out the existing interior, retaining only the perimeter walls, and inserting a new structural body of blue-pigmented concrete. Rising from the basement cellar, this inserted core incorporates a helical staircase and extends upward to form the slabs of the upper levels. It culminates beneath a skylight on the first floor, where daylight streams into the central void and organizes the surrounding rooms.

vivid rippled panels envelop TEN’s care-based housing for women in bosnia-herzegovina

On the outskirts of Gradačac, a town in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, stands The House for Five Women, a vibrant residence by architecture studio TEN. The project rises from the countryside to defy conventional housing models through an architecture of care, resilience, and collective authorship.

Designed with local activist Hazima Smajlović, NGO Naš Izvor, Engineers Without Borders, and the Gradačac municipality, the project provides a permanent home for five single women who have survived war, displacement, and systemic neglect. It’s positioned between privacy and solidarity to propose a new paradigm for cohabitation with five individual living units clustered around communal spaces for gathering, working, and growing food.

Artist Shirana Shahbazi sculpts the facade of the building, composing a vibrant arrangement of large, colored aluminum panels in shades of pink, red, green, and deep blue. Though seemingly spontaneous, the composition is specially calibrated, with each panel being custom-made in a local car painter’s workshop. Their rippled, high-gloss surfaces catch and distort reflections, and transform the shell into a shifting, almost liquid canvas that responds to light and movement.

image by Maxime Delvaux, Adrien de Hemptinne

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