My grandfather designed the condo in Taipei three generations of us grew up in. Nine hundred square feet of small tile and wood with a Japanese sensibility that never once felt small — not even for a family of four and a Dalmatian. There was a tatami room where we’d pile in together. Every room had two doors so the whole space had flow. Good chi.
Design has always been a love language in our family. My father followed my grandfather into architecture, and some of my earliest memories are of examining his models and noticing building details. The ritual continues — over breakfast the other day, flipping through an architecture magazine together, we landed on Mickey Muennig’s Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur and I found myself wondering: how many legendary buildings by iconic architects could you not just visit, but actually stay in it?
Here’s where to start.
01. Post Ranch Inn — Mickey Muennig
Big Sur, California
The architect: Mickey Muennig arrived in Big Sur in 1971 after attending a retreat at Esalen and never really left. He designed so many homes along that stretch of the California coast that he became known simply as “the man who built Big Sur.” Deeply influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture philosophy, Muennig believed buildings should grow from their landscapes rather than be imposed upon them — using local timber, stone, and glass to make structures that feel less like constructions and more like geological formations. He passed away in 2021 at 86.
What it’s known for: Post Ranch Inn is Muennig’s only hotel design, and it’s hard to imagine it being replicated anywhere else. The 39 rooms — Tree Houses, Ocean Houses, Mountain Houses — each respond to their specific site. The Tree Houses are built on nine-foot stilts among the redwoods. The Ocean rooms sit at the cliff’s edge, nearly all glass, their planted roofs dissolving into the hillside’s wildflowers and grasses. Every structure was designed so that you are never not aware of where you are.
The design: Wood, glass, and stone serve not as materials but as extensions of the cliffs and sky. Floor-to-ceiling windows dissolve the boundary between inside and outside. Fireplaces anchor each room. The buildings don’t compete with the landscape — they seem to have grown from it.
How to book: Directly at postranchinn. Three Michelin Keys. Budget accordingly — this is a special occasion property in every sense.
0.2 Benesse House — Tadao Ando
Naoshima, Japan
The architect: Tadao Ando never formally studied architecture. The self-taught Osaka native — and former boxer — learned by traveling, studying buildings, and drawing them, eventually developing one of the most recognizable architectural languages in the world: monumental planes of exposed concrete interrupted by water, sky, and precisely controlled natural light. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1995.
What it’s known for: When Benesse House opened on the Japanese island of Naoshima in 1992, the idea was quietly radical: a contemporary art museum you could sleep inside. It was Ando’s first building on Naoshima and became the architectural starting point for the island’s transformation into one of the world’s most extraordinary destinations for contemporary art. Today the property encompasses four Ando-designed lodging wings — Museum, Oval, Park, and Beach — scattered between the hills and the Seto Inland Sea.
The design: This is quintessential Ando: concrete, geometry, silence, water, and light. But the architecture is never really the endpoint. Huge openings frame the sea and sky; artwork appears inside galleries, guest rooms, forests, and along the shoreline. The six-room Oval sits high above the museum, reached by monorail, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Inland Sea. The effect is less hotel-with-art than living temporarily inside an artwork.
How to book: Directly through Benesse Art Site Naoshima. If you’re going for the full architectural experience, look at the Museum or six-room Oval first.
03. RiverRock House — Frank Lloyd Wright
Willoughby Hills, Ohio
The architect: Frank Lloyd Wright is the most consequential American architect who ever lived — designing nearly 1,000 structures over a 70-year career, from Fallingwater to the Guggenheim. His philosophy of organic architecture held that buildings should exist in harmony with humanity and the natural environment. He died in 1959 at 91, having never stopped working.
What it’s known for: RiverRock is Wright’s final residential commission — the blueprints were found on his drawing board at Taliesin West after his death. The house was commissioned by Louis Penfield, an artist and former client, and the designs sat unbuilt for decades until a team completed construction in early 2025. It is, remarkably, a brand new Frank Lloyd Wright house.
The design: Organic architecture in its most distilled form — open floor plans, clean lines, natural materials, a wood-burning stone fireplace, and a glass-walled living room with sweeping views of 30 wooded acres. Every decision reflects Wright’s belief that a house should be a shelter in the deepest sense: psychologically protective, visually generous, rooted in its landscape.
How to book: Visit RiverRock House. Available for overnight stays at $800 per night, three bedrooms.
04. The Palmer House — Frank Lloyd Wright
Ann Arbor, Michigan
The architect: Same Wright, different era, different mood. By the time Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Palmer House in 1950, he was in his eighties and deep into one of the most experimental periods of his career. Rather than repeating the rectilinear geometry associated with his earlier work, Wright increasingly played with circles, hexagons, diamonds, and here, the triangle as a governing form.
What it’s known for: Built on two heavily wooded acres in a quiet Ann Arbor neighborhood, the Palmer House is a multilevel brick and cypress structure whose plan is based entirely on the equilateral triangle. The result is a series of angular, interlocking spaces that feel simultaneously intimate and surprising. This is a home for living in — and it shows.
The design: Look up first: the dramatic ceiling rises toward a 40-foot chimney apex, while deep rooflines extend toward the woods. Inside, Wright carried the triangular language into custom furniture and built-in cabinetry. Staying here means inhabiting an entire Wright-designed world — sitting in his chairs, moving through his geometry, watching the light change across spaces conceived more than seventy years ago.
How to book: Available on Airbnb and Vrbo. Rates from approximately $395 per night. Sleeps up to five guests.
05. La Muralla Roja — Ricardo Bofill
Calpe, Spain
The architect: Ricardo Bofill was the great provocateur of postmodern architecture — a Catalan architect whose work drew equally from North African casbahs, brutalist structure, and classical Mediterranean forms. He built across continents, but La Muralla Roja, completed in 1973, remains his most viscerally iconic work. He passed away in 2022.
What it’s known for: “The Red Wall.” Fifty apartments arranged around a Greek cross plan, climbing the cliffside above Calpe’s Mediterranean coast in a labyrinth of terraces, staircases, and bridges. The color palette — deep pink, red, blue, violet — is coded by zone, turning the complex into something between a building and a painting. Part casbah, part M.C. Escher sketch, entirely itself.
The design: Bofill was interested in what he called the “theatricalization of space” — the idea that architecture should create a sense of drama, ritual, and movement. Every staircase at La Muralla Roja is a composition. Every rooftop pool a stage. The building was reportedly one of the visual inspirations behind Squid Game’s set design, which tells you something about its psychological charge.
How to book: Multiple apartments available on Airbnb and Booking.com, from approximately €120 per night. Book well in advance — this is one of the most sought-after architectural stays in Europe.
06. Säynätsalo Town Hall — Alvar Aalto
Säynätsalo, Finland
The architect: Alvar Aalto is Finland’s most celebrated architect and one of the defining figures of 20th century modernism. Where many modernists pursued machine-like precision and cool rationality, Aalto was interested in warmth, texture, and the human body’s relationship to space. He worked across architecture, furniture, glassware, and urban planning — always returning to the question of what makes a space feel good to be inside.
What it’s known for: Completed in 1952, Säynätsalo Town Hall is considered one of Aalto’s masterworks — a small civic complex on an island in Lake Päijänne that manages to feel simultaneously monumental and intimate. Built in red brick with a raised central courtyard, it draws on Italian hill towns, Nordic timber traditions, and Aalto’s own deep interest in natural materials and light.
The design: Everything is considered — from the ceiling structure of the council chamber to the furniture Aalto designed specifically for the building. The guest rooms, named after Alvar and Elissa Aalto, are located in the quiet residential wing overlooking the courtyard. Overnight guests also gain access to a tour of Muuratsalo Experimental House, Aalto’s summer studio on the lake.
How to book: Available on Airbnb or directly at tavolobianco.com. Open year-round.’
07. Shishi-Iwa House — Shigeru Ban
Karuizawa, Japan
The architect: Shigeru Ban has spent his career questioning what architecture needs to be made of — and what it should do for the people who inhabit it. The Japanese architect, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2014, is perhaps best known for transforming humble materials like paper tubes and timber into structures of remarkable beauty, from private homes and museums to emergency shelters for communities displaced by disaster. His work is experimental without being cold, guided by a belief that good architecture should respond to its surroundings rather than dominate them.
What it’s known for: Shishi-Iwa House began with an unusually simple constraint: don’t cut down the trees. When Ban was commissioned to design the retreat in the forests of Karuizawa, he mapped the existing trees and shaped the building around them, creating a long, curving structure that threads through the landscape rather than clearing it away. The first house opened in 2019 and has since grown into a collection of intimate architectural retreats.
The design: Timber replaces the concrete often associated with contemporary Japanese architecture here. The building bends gently through the forest, with broad windows framing trees almost like artwork and interiors furnished with pieces by Alvar Aalto, Charlotte Perriand, and Ban himself. There are no grand architectural gestures for their own sake. The pleasure is in noticing how little separates you from the landscape — which, of course, took an enormous amount of design to achieve.
How to book: Directly through Shishi-Iwa House. Located in Karuizawa, approximately 70 minutes from Tokyo by bullet train.
Architecture is not decoration. It is a decision about how life should feel — how we move through a room, where light enters, what we see when we look outside, how much of the world around us is allowed in.
These architects arrived at that question differently. Some built into the landscape; others curved around what was already there. They worked in concrete, timber, brick, glass, and stone, but the best of them seemed to be after the same thing: spaces that change the way you experience being inside them.
Most legendary architecture asks us to visit, look, and leave. These places offer something rarer. Stay awhile. Wake up there. See what it feels like to live inside someone else’s idea of how life could be.
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Sources:
Post Ranch Inn
Benesse Art Site Naoshima
Black Tomato
RiverRock House
Michigan Architectural Foundation
Wallpaper
ArchEyes
archello
Finnish Design Shop
Architectural Digest
FRAME
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