Pardon me, but where could I find this cream & brown loft? Oh like it matters. Sigh… (click through for 3 more sensational photos) [via]

Dwell magazine has kindly pieced together a brief slideshow of outdoor showers in houses it has featured (click through). Each of the houses, in Sydney, Tokyo, Norway, Washington state, London, Venice Beach, and New Zealand, are worth looking at in full. The Venice Beach house, for example, is sustainably fashioned after a Balinese beach compound. In Norway they’ve tucked probably the most stunning Fire Island cottage I’ve ever seen into a dramatic coastal inlet. The Washington house looks like an ice cube tray on its side, perched on the crown of the world.

One of these lamps costs $185 - score! [via ffffound]

J. B. Blunk, a woodworking sculptor, built his house & workshop in the northern Marin foothills and made it a sacred space for 40 years until his passing in 2002. Whereupon he decreed that the property be made into an artist’s residency, as it has been ever since. For two-month stretches, invited artists of any stripe can live here in solitude, stare their muses in the eye, and by all means use the rough-hewn bathroom sink pictured above.

That photo (click through for larger) is by Leslie Williamson; it is included in a book of her interiors photography called Modern Handcrafted [buy]. The interiors are all of houses, like Blunk’s, which were built by the artists and designers who lived in them, and have been kept as they were intended. A few more large previews from the book.

I found the house in the November 2010 Dwell, contained in five tantalizing but very small snapshots which the magazine in its wisdom decided not to repost online. Have a look here.

Most enchanting to me is its cobbled-together approach to enclosing spaces, almost as if by accident - the logic of a non-architect. More glimpses from around the web: [front of the house] [back of the house] [living room] [int. wall] [foyer & dining] [workshop] [workshop #2] [tools] [reading] [porch & view]

[J. B. Blunk at work]

[photo credits: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Wood-burning hot tub! My dad-in-law has one of these. A lot of upkeep but an extraordinary warmth.

“Worth” exactly $1bn USD, this is a residential tower. For one family. 

Click through for a cheeky Telegraph article, but in short the richest man in India, Mukesh Ambani, has moved his family into this modest abode in Mumbai. It contains a cinema (free of charge if you live there), an outdoor garden space high enough for trees, three helipads, probably a couple of bidets, room for over 150 cars - yet only one ballroom (apartments on Park Ave have those)! [via Curbed]

For some $8 million, this creaking stucco pile of heavenly terraces, in an Amalfi coast town 20 minutes by boat from Capri, can be yours. Click through for more slides from the Times.

For those of us who would like a studio of our own: oh well. Click through for stunning photos of a personal sculpture space in the scenic Hellenic dry pan, within 100 miles northwest of Athens.

What have we here? A wide open space, between two chairs, as they take in the acres of air that pass them along the plains. [via]

Dennis Hopper’s house, anyone? [via]