Just off the living room and kitchen is the home office. The owner commissioned a cabinet-maker to create these built-ins as well as numerous others that look like fine furniture.

Because the Mercer Island lot had little buildable area, the house grew upward instead of outward. Building it as modules, one with a flat roof, the other peaked, gives it an unexpectedly dramatic quality.

Builder: Meyer Building Co.

Construction cost/size: $1.3 million/3,620 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.25 baths

The intent: To provide Northwest modern luxury on an environmental budget. That budget was the topography — a ravine lot with little buildable space. It necessitated a narrow house that grew to four stories. Ground floor: garage. Second floor: children's bedrooms. Third floor: master suite plus combination great room and kitchen. Top floor: library and guest room. The Northwest luxury is most evident in the lodge-like great room. It has a vaulted cedar ceiling, maple floors and Northern sugar maple cabinetry that looks like fine furniture. A view of the Cascade Mountains provides the finishing touch.

	Architect Gene Morris designed the roof's barrel-vaulted ceiling metal support system both to give architectural interest and to allow maximum height for the second-story entertainment loft.

Builder: International Marine Flotation Systems

Construction cost/size: $500,000/2,093 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 baths

The intent: To create for owner Heinz Strobl a stylish, high-quality floating home that maximizes every inch of space. Morris translated that into a new two-story home with a basement — complete with viewing window three feet underwater. Set on a concrete floating platform, the home's focal points are its two-story wall of wood-framed windows overlooking Lake Union and its barrel-vaulted roof. That shape allowed Morris to squeeze every inch out of the 16-foot height limit the site imposed and allowed the second floor to have two pocket decks. High-quality finishes, such as heated bamboo-and-stone floors, were used throughout

Built in Canada and barged to Lake Union, Heinz Strobl's houseboat offers a two-story living room and dining area. The recessed upstairs loft leads to two decks.

	Except for the new windows, oversized to capture Lake Washington views, the exterior of this Madison Park home remains much the same as when it was built in 1907.

Builder: M.C. Bellan Construction

Construction cost/size: $460,000/2,600 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 3 baths

The intent: To transform a two-story 1907 home, pairing a cutting-edge interior with a restored exterior. The interior was gutted and opened up. A two-story entry leads to a mahogany-clad hallway "tunnel" that opens into the home's focal point — the kitchen and dining space. Finishes are luxe, from the fossilized French limestone sinks and countertops to the Norwegian quartzite floors that continue through the dining room out onto the patio. Mahogany-framed glass walls can be rolled back to open the dining area to the outdoors. The upstairs master suite features a shower with a clear glass exterior wall. Shower steam creates the privacy.

The remodeled dining area, with kitchen beyond, has new sliding doors that can be pushed back to completely open this room to the private rear patio. The floor is Norwegian quartzite.

	What once was a nondescript daylight-basement rambler is now a stylish contemporary home whose rooms were reoriented to take advantage of the west-facing water view. To the right is the new entry portico. The previous entry was hard to find.

Builder: John Quig

Construction cost/size: $398,000/3,600 square feet, 1 bedroom, 2.5 baths

The intent: To resuscitate a well-worn daylight rambler, turning it into an airy, private retreat for artist Terri Fletcher and her husband Geoff, who's in educational software. Both work at home; its entire downstairs is now their office, studio and gallery. Brown says his biggest challenge was "making the house fit with the land better." That meant taking the main floor down to the subfloor, reorienting the rooms to the water and mountain views and opening them up. Varied ceiling heights, rather than walls, now delineate the main living spaces, which have a Zen-like esthetic. One focal point: a "floating" granite bar separating kitchen and dining area.

		From the front, this four-plex appears to be two identical duplexes; the side seen here contains two units. The nearly identical top floors are bedrooms, where the architect made use of each inch by calling for vaulted ceilings and private, covered decks that also help break up the building's mass.

Builder: Caldonia Bay Builders

Construction cost/size: $1.6 million/four 1,925-square-foot townhomes, each 4 bedrooms, 3.25 baths

The intent: To seamlessly integrate a four-unit townhouse complex into an existing single-family neighborhood. Because the area has an eclectic mix of housing styles, Abrahams felt comfortable doing something different: Mission style with a Northwest twist. Thus, red tile roofs and metal balconies combine with cedar siding. Because Abrahams also wanted the units to have the amenities houses have, each has its own distinct entry and outline (thanks to curvilinear parapets) and its own parking space (gained by elevating the main floor slightly). The nearly identical townhouses have cherry floors, gas fireplaces, skylights, soaking tubs and private, fenced rear yards. Price of each: $549,950.

Elizabeth Rhodes, no relation to Tim Rhodes, covers residential real estate for The Seattle Times.