If you needed another reason to visit Portugal, here’s one: Cucumbi, a four-room, three-apartment guest house on an organic farm, run by husband and wife Catarina and ToZé, and just opened a few months ago. But you’ll have to venture a bit to find it. The house, which formerly belonged to the couple’s family, is located in the rural village of Barrancão where, the couple reports on the guest house website, “once a week they have a public transportation to the city, three times a week the baker delivers some bread.” Inside are rustic, earth-toned interiors left sparse—white walls, concrete floors,…

Here at Remodelista, we’re pretty omnivorous when it comes to architectural and interior styles. We can admire a dressed-to-the-nines formal home (like this one) and, in the same breadth, applaud a rustic DIY cabin with no running water (like this one). Sometimes, though, we happen upon projects that make us want to pack up and move right in. Paul West’s duplex, in a compact London Victorian, falls into this special category. It helps that the space itself is blessed with good bones. “There was so much to love,” says Paul about why he chose to buy it five years ago.…

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Since we first featured their Ping Pong House a year ago, I’ve been pulled again and again to the website of Studio Strato, the Rome-based firm of architects Vincenzo Tattolo and Martino Fraschetti. The duo have a way of making spaces feel playful but serene, artful and sculptural, even poetic, but wholly livable, and with masterful doses of color. Recently I fell for their “Tuscan Red House”: a twentieth-century building in the Testaccio district of Rome that the firm renovated for a young couple—a freelancer and a creative—and their kids. The project was completed a few years back but—with its retro tiled kitchen floor,…

Lately we’ve been admiring DIY kitchen makeovers involving little more than paint applied to dreary wooden cabinets (see Remodeling 101: 6 Kitchen Cabinets Transformed with Paint for evidence). How to best tackle such a project on your own? For advice, I turned to Albert Ridge of Ridge Painting in NYC. Albert, who grew up in County Galway, Ireland, and his crew are known in my northern neck of the city as the most meticulous, top-of-the-line house painters around. Having watched them work miracles on my own battered midcentury kitchen, I asked Albert to give us his top tips. Above: Architects…