John Salmen is a fun-loving guy and his house reflects that. Nothing says “a place I can live when I’m old and frail.” Instead, most visitors will find a delightful renovation of a 1900’s bungalow. Every detail that will help him and his wife in old age is so seamlessly incorporated visitors won’t notice a thing if they aren’t tipped off first.

Peter Eisenman, one the world’s most respected architects, is known for provocative designs that challenge conventional ideas about what buildings should look like, how they should function, and how we experience them. In a recent interview he talked about the difference between houses and homes, with a lesson for every homeowner. “Architects design houses,” Eisenman said. “I live in a home.”

From the street, the house in Windemere, Fla., could be in any new subdivision anywhere in the U.S. But once inside, you know it’s not a typical homebuilder’s furnished model. This “concept house” from KB Home has had a Martha Stewart makeover and Martha, it turns out, is a wizard with details, scale and proportion. Her changes were small but to great effect.

Can you know what it feels like to stand in a house without actually standing in it? This is not a theoretical question. As computer-generated virtual-reality images of homes become less costly to generate, many in the home-building industry expect them to play a central role in the buying experience. The amount of information you want in the virtual tour, however, will depend on where you are in your new home search.

The New American Home 2010 was supposed to be a spectacular show house and a centerpiece of the International Builders Show in Las Vegas. Instead, the fate of the 6,800-square-foot house accurately reflected the state of luxury home building — and the ravaged Vegas market. Show-goers were able to take virtual reality tours of the house.

When architect Barry Berkus designed a pied-a-terre for himself in Santa Barbara, Calif., he brought an unusual depth to the project – more than 50 years of experience in residential design. He has custom-designed several hundred homes for individual owners and more than 10,000 homes for home builders all over the country.

Before Katherine saw the New American Home at the 2009 International Builder's Show in Las Vegas, she wanted to hate it. With 8,816 square feet of indoor living space, it sounded like one more example of show house excess with little to teach most visitors. But this show house turns out to be a great house, especially if you have $4 million or $5 million to spare and want to live in Las Vegas.

Spending time alone inside Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House in Connecticut, Katherine muses on the architect’s process in designing the home and also visits its mirror opposite, the Brick House, and other Johnson-designed buildings on the property.

The house that celebrated designers Charles and Ray Eames created for themselves in Pacific Palisades, Calif., isn’t well known outside the design professions. A prefabricated steel-frame house with an open floor plan, it caused a sensation in 1949 and continues to be beloved by architects today.

For most Americans the most important house in America is the White House. For architects it’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It is revered because of its extraordinary design and because it demonstrates what is possible when a designer has a one in a million clients who is willing to leap into the great unknown and build a house that breaks with tradition in just about every way.

An American original, the suburban ranch house of the late 1940s introduced new construction methods, a new way of incorporating large areas of glass that blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors, a very private back yard, and the open floor plan with fewer walls and several functions within one area of the house. These have influenced the design of nearly every house built since.

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is one of the world’s most famous houses. When it was completed in 1931, its spare look, flat roof and reinforced concrete framing were shocking; even today the house is still provocative. It was never widely copied, but many of its features, including large windows that fill a space with light and big multipurpose rooms, are common in new housing today.