17 Projects That Use “Ugly” Materials in Beautiful Ways
This story is part of Pretty Ugly, a package celebrating design that’s so bad, it’s good.
Is it really that hard to build a head-turning project out of marble slabs or sleek glass panels? Where’s the challenge in turning velvety-smooth white oak boards or hand-chiseled stone into an architectural masterpiece? While we obviously love beautiful homes built from beautiful materials (see: every page of this website), there’s something extra special about designs that lean on more, uh, unconventional resources.
Corrugated metal, concrete pipes, and cardboard may not be the most inspiring of materials, but when industrial supplies wind up in the right hands, the results can be downright magical. You know what they say: one person’s trash is another’s statement-making feature wall.
Whether these designers chose their unexpected materials to save money, create a one-of-a-kind space, or simply remind us that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places (for example, the dumpster), each of these projects uses "ugly" materials in beautiful new ways.
A Wire-and-Steel Office, Built in a Former Italian Villa
Italian design firm Archisbang transformed an unfinished family villa—acquired through a bankruptcy auction—into additional office space for a company called Chemsafe. The volume is wrapped in a metal mesh and the walls are clad in exposed wood fiber, concrete insulating panels, and galvanized metal sheets, creating a striking contrast between precise detailing and raw materiality.
Archisbang saw the value in materials left exposed, so it amplified the look with mesh wiring, galvanized steel, and wood and concrete fiber panels.
The renovated basement has curtains made of shiny bubble wrap, steel grate catwalks, and reflective surfaces everywhere.
Curtains made out of bubble wrap provide privacy while allowing sufficient light to enter the interior.
OSB was the right choice for the interiors of Shipwreck Lodge, a low-impact boutique hotel in the sand dunes of Namibia’s coastline. Designed by Windhoek-based Nina Maritz Architects, the 20-bed property was constructed on a $2,000,000 budget that relied heavily on prefabrication to minimize environmental impact, and to ensure comfort for guests in the remote and extremely harsh desert.
The buildings are designed to look like shipwrecked boats, but inside, it’s cozy and chic.
In Mexico City's central Cuauhtémoc neighborhood, the new Hotel Carlota revives a once-glamorous location. The 36-room hotel takes the place of Hotel Jardín Amazonas, a popular 1970s hangout that had fallen out of favor and lingered on into the 21st century as a run-down budget motel. Little remains of the former hotel except for the exterior corridors, which combine a concrete-brick lattice and plywood details.
The homeowners tapped architect Malcolm Davis of San Francisco–based Malcolm Davis Architecture to redesign and expand the dwelling without damaging the many established oak trees.
Surrounded by a sea of forest in Northern California, the Portola Valley House features fire-resistant construction. The annex is wrapped with Cor-Ten corrugated siding, while shou sugi ban timber clads the main house.
Architectural designer Alexis Dornier of Stilt Studios devised Tetra Pod, a 688-square-foot prefabricated home made from recycled Tetra Pak cartons in Uluwatu, Bali. "The reflective characteristics of the material help the architecture blend into the surroundings," he says.
The roof of the garden house and the main extension are made of metal decking, which is left exposed inside. "Metal decking is almost never used for domestic projects, but it allowed us to create an articulated ceiling with linear ‘vaults’ or ‘waves’—instead of the boring, more traditional ‘cover it with gypsum boards’ approach," says architect Mariia Pashenko. "The waves of the decking create an architectural theme together with the waves of the metal facade panels and window curtains."
The exposed blockwork is painted off-white to match the facade, doors, windows, and other elements. The blocks were laid in a stack bond format for the exterior garden wall, and as a stretcher bond inside, creating a subtle difference between the interior and the outside.
For this kitchen renovation, the homeowners decided on cabinets designed by Ghent-based duo Muller Van Severen for Reform, a Danish company that elevates Ikea kitchens with designer fronts. The panels are made from durable, wax-like, high-density polyethylene (HDPE)—a plastic traditionally used in cutting boards, and Muller Van Severen’s signature material. "We have always felt a love for polyethylene, with its powerful colors," explains Fien Muller. "It is not a dead plastic with a cold and smooth surface. It has a soft and warm appearance that invites you to touch."
Feeling the squeeze from Hong Kong's affordable housing crisis, James Law of James Law Cybertecture dreamt up a surprising new microhousing solution.
His OPod Tube House is an experimental, low-cost, microhome designed to provide temporary living space for young people. It’s made from a 2.5-meter-diameter concrete water pipe.
Studio Okami tore down the walls of this five-bedroom apartment and stripped away layers of finishing to reveal beautifully textured concrete.
The rough concrete is balanced out with a peach-colored liquid floor trough-out. The concrete walls form the ideal backdrop for the homeowners’ art collection, and existing holes and plugs define the position of every artwork.
The modest two-story studio building by architect Greg Katz is made of a lightweight steel framework entirely clad in what is traditionally a roofing material: an asphalt-colored shingle, made of only two-millimeter-thick recycled rubber sheets, finished with a silicate coating (with a 20-year lifespan). The circular pavers are not actual pavers, but the residue from the pouring of the coffered slabs for House Katz. Instead of letting it go to waste, Katz asked the builders to pour the small amount of concrete left over from each newly mixed batch into a circular container. Once set, these circular shapes were popped out and stored to ultimately become a playful walkway.
A testament to the strength, skill, and poignancy of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s "emergency architecture," this A-frame marvel of cardboard tubing and shipping containers served as a potent symbol of recovery after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. In another symbolic touch, the stained glass triangle at the front of the church incorporates imagery from the former cathedral’s famous rose window.
Måns Tham, architect and founder of Måns Tham Arkitektkontor, describes his latest residential design in a memorable way. "It’s as if a flying Tetris block landed on steep granite rocks," he says.
Eight gray shipping containers form the home, which perches on a rocky, forested site outside Stockholm. Windows at one facade look out through treetops toward a quiet lake—but with the uneven terrain, capturing the view wasn’t easy.
This 475-square-foot home in Eton, England, by architect Matthew Barnett Howland is made almost entirely of reconstituted waste cork—a by-product of the cork industry in Portugal.
The exposed, solid-cork blocks are gentle to the touch, and they even smell good. The acoustics are soft and calm, and the house only requires heating on the coldest days.
Crafted with simplicity in mind, the compact, three-bedroom home by Studio Jackson Scott Sydney features a bold facade that belies its modest, 1,044-square-foot size. The patterned facade was created from fiber-cement panels—chosen for their lightweight properties, low cost, and ease of installation—and timber battens fitted between panels to protect the joints.
London-based Practice Architecture incorporated hemp into the exterior cladding of this environmentally friendly farmhouse.
The corrugated panels are made of nonwoven hemp fiber blended with a resin made from the farm’s biowaste—like corn cobs, oat hulls, and leftover sugarcane fiber. Underneath these panels lies a layer of hemp-based insulation, which is left exposed for a warm, textured feel.
The facade is clad with 600 recycled cable reels. According to architect Jan Jongert, "It took about seven minutes to dismantle each one, yielding quite a lot of wood each time."
The wood was heat treated at high temperatures in a natural weatherproofing technique known as the PLATO process.
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