Travel to the World's Coolest Contemporary Mountain Houses

Building in the mountains has always been one of the more difficult feats for humankind. Despite, or perhaps because of, that it's long been a place for architectural inventiveness. Today, some of the coolest buildings around the world that incite our wanderlust are found in mountains.

That's why this week's selection for Just Booked (our series on exciting new travel-related coffee table books) is Phaidon's Living in the Mountains: Contemporary Houses in the Mountains. It is a close look at 17 projects around the world that best capture the unique views of mountains, views that allow one, in the words of the editor, "to look out and be humbled by the great forces that once thrust the rock into the sky, and gain a wider perspective on our place in the world."

Some of the houses are sleek wonders of concrete with sexy pools and swanky interiors lit by giant floor-to-ceiling- windows (like the Camino a Farellones in Chile). Others, like the Lone Mountain Ranch House in New Mexico, take a simple single-story charred wood house and within transform a distant mountain range into a horizontal vista right out of a widescreen Western. There are jungle mountain houses in Brazil and vertical slat wood boxes in Europe. But whether one of the OTT houses or a simple hut in Switzerland—we'd take any of them.