The beauty of residential architecture is its diversity and its infinite scope for architectural invention and innovation. Each house in this book has been selected for its unique and extraordinary qualities.

These houses stand apart from their neighbors in many ways, displaying creative adaptations to inhospitable terrain or strict heritage building controls, exploring the cutting-edge use of materials and technology, and featuring the precise reproduction of period details and building techniques. Ingenious responses to 21st-century imperatives such as sustainability, inventive interpretations of vernacular building types, and their outstanding responses to a host of other challenges also place them in a class of their own.The overwhelming theme is the way in which architects use their remarkable skills to relate these masterpieces to their various contexts and landscapes.

Locations are as diverse as the houses themselves. The coast of Peru, inner-city London, rugged Australian coastal sites, urban Sao Paulo, spectacular New Zealand alpine retreats and coastal hideaways, American prairies, frosty Oslo, the gorgeous West Indies, tropical Southeast Asia, suburban Lithuania, and Costa Rica are just a sprinkling of the enviable sites featured.

Turning the pages from slick urban dream homes to rustic beauties, from the experimental to the vernacular, we realize that these 100 houses have a common bond, and that the architects all had the same goal-to create a place that can be called 'home'.