The Thurston Wine House Addition carefully displays a respect for its context through its materiality and its tectonic language while expressing its unconventional program through its formal elements. Embedded into the topography of the site, the project takes advantage of its section by using the slope to decrease the visual impact of structure, allowing access to the northeast valley and McDowell Mountain views beyond. The Wine House also benefits from the thermal storage capacity of the earth itself, greatly reducing the demand of the mechanical systems throughout the year — via ArchDaily

The Scheme was for a new 94 bed boarding house for Badminton School, Bristol. Badminton is one of the foremost girl’s schools in the country and they wanted a forward looking building to provide new accommodation for the girls and house staff.

The building covers three storeys and is largely wrapped at the upper levels in an un-treated Larch cladding skin above a brick base that dissolves into the ground plane and the surrounding landscape. The building has a very efficient use of space to provide the accommodation and then the building is broken along its length to form the central circulation and social areas which flood the centre of the building with light and ventilation and to expand the views across the Avon valley behind — via ArchDaily

Recycling a single story suburban house located on a busy corner site, the Jigsaw Residence introverts itself in a continuous spatial flow around an open air courtyard carved from the home’s remains. A matrix of spaces is linked by movement through them as storeys merge and spaces relate to each other as they rise and fall in a series of interlocked puzzle-like volumes giving a unique three dimensional framework to each space where plan and section respond to program simultaneously — via ArchDaily

Soap bars are more efficient than liquid soap dispensers but are also a messy pain in the ass. Enter design student Nathalie Stämpfli’s Soap Flakes. It works like a pump dispenser and grates a small amount of soap into your hand when you pump the handle — via kottke.org

Dick Clark Architecture have designed the Terrace Mountain House in Austin, Texas.

Located on a steep site in Westlake Hills, oriented towards a spectacular view of downtown Austin, this 4,700 square foot house merges traditional Texas forms and materials with unique contemporary details.  The plan is simply arranged around an open living, dining, and kitchen space that accomodates the clients’ desire to entertain while providing a buffer between public and private use — via CONTEMPORIST

The popular Incursore collection from Glycine returns with a model II and model III. Relatively inexpensive, these watches comes with a few dial styles and with automatic or manually wound movements — via A Blog to Read

There is a thriving houseboat community on Seattle’s Lake Union. It is almost a shanty town: a squeezed-in suburb of houseboats living cheek by jowl, all enjoying great water views. But the variety of houseboats is so great that there are true luxury houseboats in with the simplest shacks.

This one is for sale — via Home Design Find

Together with its recently released RM 010 Boutique Special timepiece, the Swiss watchmaker has also introduced a Richard Mille RM 010 Black Night limited edition watch.

Like its sibling, the RM 010 Black Night is powered by the RM 005-basd RM 010 automatic caliber that features their proprietary variable geometry winding rotor.

The only difference between the base movement and its more recent incarnation is that the RM 010 is meticulously skeletonized and looks quite good both through the sapphire display back and the transparent dial — via World Watch Review