The 25 Most Important Homes of the Past 25 Years

This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years.

We asked our editors—and some friends of the magazine—to name the houses that defined home design over the past 25 years. We narrowed it down to this list—which includes everyone from Zaha Hadid to Kim Kardashian.

Small House by Kazuyo Sejima

2000

Kazuyo Sejima’s aptly named home occupies a 388-square-foot patch of a typically tight Tokyo lot. Inside, living spaces flow into one another, many separated only by the spiral stair that cuts through each floor of the house. The kitchen, dining area, and living room overlap on one level, while a bathroom opens onto a terrace on the top floor. The floor plates vary in size, with more space dedicated to the public areas on the middle floors than to the more private spaces above and below, allowing the house to have its small footprint and faceted shape. Expressive minimalism and an open plan—it’s all here in a home that kicked off the 21st century.

Wall House by Anupama Kundoo

2000

Built in 2000, architect Anupama Kundoo’s Wall House, near Auroville, India, is an experiment with what some might view as outdated building techniques, but the risks taken paid off. Kundoo eschewed conventional construction styles by working with the community of local craftspeople to erect the home using Indian achakal bricks—”the oldest mass-manufactured object in the world,” she told the Financial Times. With soaring, arched roofs made from terra-cotta tubes (which remarkably don’t require any reinforcement) and a plan that’s radically open to its setting, thanks in part to hole-punched, operable ferro-cement screens lining one side of the living spaces, the residence is an enduring example of what can happen when heritage craftsmanship is pushed to its limits. Twenty-five years later, a zeal among designers for Kundoo’s brand of honest materiality and time-honored building techniques has become common all over the world.

“Wall House embodies a low-tech radicalism that has deeply shaped my understanding of material storytelling and labor-conscious design. Its experimental use of ferro-cement and recycled materials has occasionally been critiqued for appearing unfinished or overly ‘vernacular,’ but that rawness feels intentional—a challenge to conventional aesthetics and the economics of polish. For me, it’s a reminder that innovation often comes from resisting the pressure to conform to market-driven definitions of beauty.”

—Anand Sheth, architect/curator