Trending on Remodelista: Summer Rentals

Are you the kind of person who defines summer by the feel of sand between your toes? In Portugal, an hour south of Lisbon on the Sado River estuary, there's an unusual inn where you can put your feet in the sand whether you're on the beach or in the living room.

New Zealanders call them "baches"; small, simple wood vacation houses for no-frills holidays by the sea.

Every summer we went to the lake—four kids under the age of eight, piled in the backseat and bickering about whose turn it was to sit by the window and threatening each other with Indian rope burns for the entire six-hour drive as my father grimly piloted the Buick. When we made that final turn and saw the cottage framed by tall pines, my mother always said, "Well, thank Christ" fervently (explosively, really) in a way I thought was overkill. Until I had children.

My neighbor Linda's house was brand new when she moved here in 2008. "It was a spec house," she says. "The builder had made a path of wood chips and stuck some plants in gallon pots into the hardpan." You would not know this now.

A cabin in the California woods may conjure visions of lazy days in a hammock. But for San Francisco architect Olle Lundberg and his wife, Mary Breuer, there's no loafing allowed.