Recent generations of farmers have reinvented the family farm and its traditions, embracing organic practices and sustainability and, along with them, a bold new use of modern architecture. The New Farm profiles sixteen contemporary farms around the globe, accompanied by plans and colorful images that highlight the connections among family, food, design, terrain, and heritage. Visit a Tasmanian sheep shearers' quarters with a dramatic coastal view and a bamboo-wrapped farm shed in Kentucky. Learn from a fourth-generation poultry breeder and newcomers who have stepped off the corporate ladder and into the barnyard. Projects include an olive oil grove and mill in California, the storied Stone Barns Center in New York, and organic farms in Canada and across Europe. An introduction places the design of these farms in a lineage of celebrated architects including William Wurster, William Turnbull, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Marc Appleton, and Tom Kundig.

Elegant rusticity meets unpretentious luxury in the work of this award-winning architecture firm. Howard Backen, principal of the architecture firm Backen, Gillam & Kroeger, is at the center of a popular movement in home design that emphasizes elegant simplicity and embraces the rustic charm of natural materials. This volume, the first on his work and that of the firm, is an artful exploration of this aesthetic, featuring farmhouses in the Napa Valley, hilltop homes, seaside retreats, and lakeside hideaways. Throughout the work, a sense of intimacy, warmth, and informality pervades. Natural materials, such as wood, stone, and brick, form the foundations, walls, and ceilings of these subtly luxurious spaces, while nature itself plays a considered role that is at once complementary and also intricately conjoined with the work. Sensitive, alluring, and wonderfully resonant with the suggestion of invitation, the work of Backen, Gillam & Kroeger is both thrilling to the eye and restorative to the soul.