Throughout this year we spent exploring living, as Domus has done for almost a century, we have encountered architectures capable of showing us a new, non-exclusive definition of the very idea of house: instead of shelters, it is more a matter of being fundamental units, integral parts, of habitats.

Of the houses we encountered, each one interacts with its context, each one has something to say: it listens to the context, respects it, integrates it, sometimes criticises it, sometimes helps it evolve.

In that multiplicity of forms and scales ranging from tiny houses to villas, seeking their own space in the forest or in the city, evoking Mies van Der Rohe, brutalism or the materiality of ground, interacting with tropical climates and inspiring landscapes, with earthquakes and social disparities, with the search for an experience that makes living unique, the houses we have selected from those we published in 2024 are architectures that show character. And again, this year, they are not only conceived for humans.

A hour's drive from Melbourne lies Mount Macedon, a small town where Ben Lance Architects has built a house that stretches over 50 meters in length. The simple forms of the volume, including the modest pitched roof, conceal a deep architectural concept that addresses fundamental themes such as the relationship between circulation space and served space, as well as the connection between interior and exterior. Read more 

In the village of Salvador do Mundo, north of Goa, the wild natural environment and tropical climatic conditions, with a monsoon season lasting six months, determine the characteristics of the built space and the habits of its inhabitants. In this context, the young Indian studio Field Atelier has created a house that, on the one hand, embodies the archetypal vocation of architecture as a shelter from external agents and, on the other, as a place of intimacy and domestic relations that unfolds around common areas and open spaces. Read more

L’edificio si staglia nel rigoglioso contesto naturale in riva all’oceano con la sua geometria nitida ed essenziale, composta da un immacolato basamento parallelepipedo a un piano da cui svetta, al centro, una piramide tronca rivestita in laterizio. Continua a leggere

With the sole purpose of creating an oasis of peace in the dense metropolitan fabric of Leblon, an “organism” perched atop an existing building rediscovers the spatiality of the Modern maestros. The intervention concerns a space with an “L” layout that houses a large central room without partitions, connected to an existing access area to the east – with kitchen, services and a small atelier – and overlooking a hanging garden to the north that, as in the Maison de Beistegui by Le Corbusier in Paris (1931), is configured as an open-air room in the heart of the metropolis, with the lawn as the floor and walls framing the sky. Read more

Nana House, the residence designed by Jean Benoît Vétillard Architecture, is located on an urban lot in Bagnolet – Parisian banlieue – divided into two parts: the building, created in continuity with a group of existing dwellings, occupies the southern sector by making the most of light and space, while the northern part of the area has been transformed into a garden, protected by a glass canopy and enriched by various elements designed to house plants. Read more