The Elrod House was designed by John Lautner for interior designer, Arthur Elrod back in 1968. Located in Palm Springs, it gained its claim to fame in a fight scene from Diamonds are Forever between James Bond and vixen duo Bambie and Thumper. It has also been featured in a number of Playboy shoots over the years.

The area of the house itself measures 9000 square feet and features a lounge area that is a 60-foot circle. A number of large boulders were incorporated into the construction of the house, an extension of its foundations. To counter the hot desert, sun he added an enormous domed concrete roof with wedge shaped skylights to let in natural light but also add shade. He also added two curved 25 foot glass curtain walls that retract at the touch of a button to open the main living area to the outside. The interior was planned by Elrod himself and considering it was designed on the cusp of the 1970s is surprisingly restrained and very spacious and elegant. Goat hair carpets and redwood ceilings are combined with low-slung chairs and the minimum of furniture. The usual sauna, swimming pool and sun deck are there plus a T-shaped bath that is basically outside.

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Designed by Japanese architecture firm, A.L.X. is this house in Tokyo called On the Cherry Blossom.

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Houssein Jarouche, owner of furniture and homeware store, Micasa, commissioned Triptyque to re-decorate his 300m2 apartment in Sao Paulo. He gave the design studio total creative freedom, and in the span of a year came up with what you see above.

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When designing KRE House in the posh Shirokane area of Tokyo, architect Takuya Tsuchida was given only two instructions. One was that there was to be a nine-car garage, with the possibility of viewing one of them from the living room. The other was that a tall tree was to be placed inside the house.

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The work of Swedish architects, Elding Oscarson is this townhouse located in Lanskrona, Sweden. It’s only five metres wide and has an area of seventy five square metres. The Swedish firm did a great job to utlize the small space to the fullest. We love clean and minimal design so they get bonus points too.

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Found in the center of Antwerp is this house designed by Britt Crepain, Stefan Spaens, and Joep Debie of CSD Architecten. The house serves as the home for Britt and Stefan, and although it only totals just over 500 square feet, there is a basement, a ground floor, 4 split-levels and a roof terrace. They have optimized every square inch of the house and used it to its full potential, and thanks to the huge windows, it’s always bathed in light.

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Thanks to Iwan Baan, we bring you images from House H designed by Sou Fujimoto.

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The work of Sebastien Wierinck takes the term interior design to a whole other level. It has a minimalist-futuristic, slighty dystopic aesthetic to it that has me drooling like a little baby. Head over to his site for more.

We don’t often cover architecture, but when we stumbled onto this house, we couldn’t resist. It’s called the Hemeroscopium House, and is located in Madrid. It’s made from gigantic concrete beams and is topped off with a huge granite stone that serves as a counterweight. It was erected in only seven days, but it took a year to plan it all out.

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Gap has turned to none other than Pritzker Prize winning architect, Frank Gehry to design a series of pop-up shops surrounding their Product(Red) campaign. So far, not much is known, but supposedly the shops will resemble jigsaw puzzles. Stay tuned.

pic and info: Racked