While most people wish to construct a home that’s under a single roof, there are instances when building the home as a series of connected or freestanding pavilions is desired. Perhaps the home serves multiple generations or have to accommodate an ever-changing mixture of family members. Or maybe the home develops over time, to ensure a home expansion is a new pavilion instead of simply an addition.

Here are just two houses which were made to resemble small villages instead of being monolithic structures. While both have their roots set deeply in their various locales, coastal Maine and Piedmont, Virginia, equally take a decidedly modern approach to family living, with the best of both traditional and the modern, the individual and the family.

Elliott + Elliott Architecture

The first home is in coastal Maine and looks like, on strategy, a small Maine fishing village. From the waterside the home looks like a fishing village so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see locals pull up in a boat to roam around, procuring a new lobster in the process.

Elliott + Elliott Architecture

From the roadside the home clearly shows off its Maine heritage, with traditional gable roofs, wood shake siding and roofing, and soft grays and browns which are, in spirit if not in actuality, the end result of that weathering that can happen only in Maine.

Elliott + Elliott Architecture

Each freestanding pavilion is a simple, gable-shaped structure which has small windows and a taut skin to withstand the bitter-cold Maine winters.

Elliott + Elliott Architecture

And while each arrangement is separate from its neighbors, there’s an urbanity for their arrangement, just like one finds at the best of Maine’s small towns. A consistent substance and color palette in addition to a consistency in form and detail be certain that the whole “village” is just one.

Elliott + Elliott Architecture

The interiors are where the saying of modernity takes hold. Open floor plans, tall ceilings and massive expanses of glass to look at the water out of are where this home separates itself from the traditional.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

Traveling down the Eastern Seaboard a couple hundred kilometers is where we encounter the second home that’s been created as a small community. But in this case, a rural Virginia home, the layout was inspired by local farming estates.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

It’s a closely dressed group of pavilions that seem like they might have been assembled over time. The main building mass is unmistakable, with its big chimney and notable central position, and the structures are organized in a hierarchical order that’s unmistakable.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

While the arrangement and types of the structures are, like the house’s Maine cousin, steeped in convention, there is no mistaking that this house belongs to our century. The materials, crisp detailing and simplicity of this are completely modern.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

And that modernity is accepted indoors, where an open plan which enables a casual 21st-century lifestyle is to be found.

Bushman Dreyfus Architects

Light-filled volumes of distance replace the traditional ceiling.

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