When your working life is spent on the ocean waves and your digs are a cabin and a galley kitchen afloat, living in tight angular rooms is the norm. For Tom Aveling, a superyacht skipper, small spaces aren’t a hardship to be endured, they’re a joy – it’s no surprise he wanted to live in one.

Like most architects, Richard Loney experimented a bit with his own house. Susanne Kennedy visited his glass-walled box hunkered into a valley in Tasmania.

A strikingly contemporary home on NSW’s Northern Tablelands speaks eloquently of Australia’s unique rural vernacular.

Agrarian influences collide with contemporary architecture in this New Zealand property, where pastoral peacefulness has settled on the land.

With the cost of building being what it is, Folk Architects came up with an affordable model for a young family wanting to continue living on the land.

Brae at Birregurra has added another string to its bow - accommodation on site designed by Six Degrees. It's the perfect place to digest the banquet and fantasise about staying permanently.

Many bush retreats take great pains to merge into their surroundings. Not this one! Designed for an adventurous couple on a modest budget, it demands to be noticed.

The pair who built the opposite of a McMansion. Cheap, ethical and cosy – a couple embrace their ‘tiny’ house.

Architect Chris Gilbert and his sculptor brother Ben have been building things together since childhood. Their ‘non-house’ for Ben, which won a Victorian Architecture Award, is alive to the elements and was designed on the fly.

A close Irish family keen to ‘holiday at home’ on a bush block outside Ballarat got just what they ordered with a clever house designed for bushfire safety and dramatically cantilevered to embrace gorgeous views.