December 2022/January 2023: The architect’s house + AR House

You do not have to be an architect to create architecture. We are all the architects of our environments and we are constantly making and remaking the spaces we live in. The teabags in perfect reach of the kettle, the armchair bathed in 11am sun, a perfectly arranged shelf of unread books, and the messy stacks of their dog-eared counterparts: the home tracks our habits, our tastes and our everyday lives. Sam Johnson-Schlee describes this as the ‘detritus of life’ in this issue’s keynote, likening homes to dreaming in the way they are ‘the gathering together of bits and pieces by the unconscious to try to meet the latent desires of the dreamer’. It’s rare to be able to realise the home of your dreams, but in the hands of an architect, the results can be remarkable: unique to the house’s inhabitants and questioning both what a house is, and how we should live in it. This issue revisits four such houses, as well as celebrating the shortlisted projects of the 2022 AR House awards, featuring innovative and intriguing dwellings from Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Bahamas.