Tiny Homes — The Solution for an Expensive Homes Market?

Twenty designs read as evidence rather than inspiration — second dwellings, skinny infill, common-land villages, stacked micro buildings and laneway houses. Housing costs in most desirable cities have risen faster than incomes for a generation, and small homes are the most frequently proposed answer. This part of the series treats twenty designs as evidence and asks a harder question: which of them actually adds a home to a market that needs one, and which simply moves a small building onto land that was already owned? Backyard second dwellings are the clearest win. They use land that is already serviced, already close to transport and schools, and already inside the city. A well designed granny flat or laneway house adds a genuine dwelling without a metre of new road, and it does so at a scale that individual owners can finance. Where planning rules permit them generously, the supply arrives quickly. Skinny infill and stacked micro buildings do the same job on leftover urban land — corner offcuts, deep rear yards, former service lanes. These sites are difficult, which is why they remain vacant, and they reward designs that go narrow and tall, borrow light from above, and place the private...

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Home Designs

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick and Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick, Vertical Cedar Screening and Zinc Roof Sheeting, Espaliered Trees, Box Hedging and Fine-Leaf. this image created by www.homedesign-photos.com — Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick, Vertical Cedar Screening and Zinc Roof Sheeting, Espaliered Trees, Box Hedging and Fine-Leaf Groundcover, featuring a Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill Entertaining Area, framed by Generous Paved Terraces and Warm Ambient

Th4 16 is part of our Home Designs collection — one of 512 large-format widescreen concept visuals in this section. It is presented here at full size so you can study the layout, the planting, the surfaces and the way light falls across the design before you commit to building anything on your own block.

Front yards, backyards, side boundaries and complete house concepts, including the tiny home series. Use this concept as a starting point: note the proportions between built form and greenery, where shade and shelter sit, how paths and paved areas move people through the space, and which materials repeat to hold the whole scheme together.

Every visual on this site is a design idea created for Home Design Photos. Browse the rest of the Home Designs collection, or open the complete image catalogue to see every home, garden, pool, pergola, furniture, lighting and beach house concept in one place.

← Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water Modern House Design with Rendered White Walls and Shaded Deck, Long Dining Table →

More Home Designs concepts

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete, Spotted Gum Battens and Matte Black Steel Detailing, Mass-Planted Hedging, Feature Palms and Deep Mulched Garden Beds, featuring a Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water Bowl and Garage Screening

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render and Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace

Low-Line Courtyard Home Design with Textured Off-White Render, Travertine Paving and Smoked Glass Balustrades, Layered Native Planting and a Clipped Buffalo Lawn, featuring a Covered Alfresco Dining Terrace and Built-In Outdoor Kitchen, finished with Sculptural Feature Planting and Inviting

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick and Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick, Vertical Cedar Screening and Zinc Roof Sheeting, Espaliered Trees, Box Hedging and Fine-Leaf Groundcover, featuring a Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill Entertaining Area, balanced by Clean Sightlines, Shaded Retreats and Relaxed

Contemporary Family Home Design with Board-Formed Concrete and Wide Front Entry Court, Feature Water

Architectural Home Design with Limestone Cladding and Poolside Cabana, Sun Deck and Evening Entertaining

Architectural Home Design with Limestone Cladding, Warm Oak Soffits and Slim Charcoal Aluminium Frames, Tropical Foliage, Frangipani and Screening Bamboo, featuring a Poolside Cabana, Sun Deck and Evening Entertaining Zone, balanced by Clean Sightlines, Shaded Retreats and Relaxed Family

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Modern Beach House Designs and Coastal Gardens

Pale timber terraces, low profile furniture framing the horizon, salt tolerant planting, outdoor showers, plunge pool courtyards and sheltered evening entertaining.

The modern coastal house is an exercise in restraint. Where the classic beach cottage decorates, the modern version subtracts until only the view, the light and one or two beautiful materials remain. Long horizontal lines, pale timber, off white render or lime wash, and glass placed so that the horizon lands exactly where the eye rests when you are seated.

Terraces do the work of rooms. A deep pale timber deck on the seaward side, a sheltered courtyard on the other, and a covered dining terrace between them means there is always somewhere comfortable regardless of wind direction. Low profile furniture is essential — anything with a tall back cuts the horizon in half and makes the whole design feel cluttered.

Coastal gardens have to earn their place in salt, sand and wind. The reliable palette is silver and grey green: coastal rosemary, westringia, agave, dune grasses, pigface, olive and hardy succulents, mulched with gravel or coarse sand and edged with hardwood. Group them in drifts rather than dotting them about, and plant a dense windbreak layer on the exposed boundary so the softer species behind it survive.

Modern Coastal design ideas photo from the Modern Beach House Designs and Coastal Gardens feature. this image created by www.homedesign-photos.com

Water appears in two forms. A plunge pool courtyard for the days the surf is too rough, ideally sunk flush with the deck and finished dark so it reflects, and an outdoor shower by the door for the days it is not. The shower is the most used fixture in any beach house and deserves proper detailing: hardwood grate, mixer rather than cold only, hooks, a bench and enough screening to be usable.

Interiors continue the same short material list. Pale engineered or brushed timber floors, plaster walls, linen upholstery, teak and rattan, and one or two large pieces of ocean artwork rather than a gallery of small frames. Storage is planned for the reality of a coastal house — boards, towels, wetsuits, fishing gear, sandy shoes — because a modern interior only stays calm if everything has a place to disappear into.

Evenings are the part most designs forget. Once the sun has gone, the glass turns black and the garden vanishes unless it is lit. Graze light across a render wall, uplight the trunk of the one significant tree, run warm strip light under the deck edge and bench seating, and keep every fitting shielded so the view outward is preserved. Add a fire element in a sheltered corner and the coastal house gains an extra season.

House Design Photos is a HUGE Library Gallery and Directory of Home Design Photos

Tiny Homes — The Solution for an Expensive Homes Market?

Split-Level Modern Home Design with Recycled Brick and Spacious Rear Backyard and BBQ Grill

More Home Designs concepts

Modern Beach House Designs and Coastal Gardens