Characterized by its dramatic cliffside setting and rebuilt by architect Mickey Muennig, a couple’s house in Big Sur serves as a calming retreat. Throughout the home, designer Mark Boone mixed furnishings by his firm, London Boone, with the clients’ art.

For a San Francisco client, designer Barry Brukoff used muted tones and matte surfaces to emphasize “one of the most spectacular views in the city,” he says. Coit Tower emerges from Telegraph Hill through the living room windows.

Designer Craig Wright, working with architect Mark D. Kirkhart, of DesignARC, transformed a 1960s ranch house into a California Mission-style retreat. The entrance drive crosses a pond to reach the residence, which is set in a grove of oaks.

“We redid the whole presentation,” designer Sally Sirkin Lewis says of a Carmel Valley house she and her associate Kenn Shlaes renovated for Ed and Ruth Morrow. The living room “was dark despite all the windows,” says Lewis. With drywall ceilings and a lightened oak floor, “the space is much brighter now,” the designer points out. “It practically glows.”

“The subtle curvature of the surrounding topography is reflected in the design, which encourages constant movement from one space to another, from interior to exterior,” says architect Wallace E. Cunningham about Wing House in Rancho Santa Fe. Cunningham, who was assisted by Peggy Walther, designed and updated the house, which sits on a four-acre site near San Diego.

Window walls in the living area of a home in Santa Monica make the most of exterior sightlines, including the lush foliage and distant mountains beyond the pool and terrace. Designed in 1963, it is the only residential structure Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer built in the United States.

Nan Tucker McEvoy, former chairman of the board of the Chronicle Publishing Company, asked Los Angeles architect Marc Appleton to design a residence for her Marin County ranch. Olive orchards, which cover 70 acres of the 550-acre property, surround the house.

Pocket doors – which remain open much of the year – separate the living area from the veranda of a home that architect Howard J. Backen built in Napa Valley for himself and his family. His wife, Lori O’Kane Backen, did the interior design.

“It’s an oasis within hectic Los Angeles,” Xorin Balbes says of the Sowden House, which was built by Lloyd Wright in 1928. Balbes, who collaborated with Bashar Shbib on the landscaping, restored the neo-Mayan structure with architect Paul Ashley.