Grace Bernard

Grace Bernard writes about real estate as lived design, focusing on modern homes and retreats where architecture, materials, and landscape shape the daily experience rather than just the floor plan. She works as a freelance writer and editorial strategist, contributing regularly to Dwell and other design and travel publications. Her coverage centers on distinctive residences around the world, with a particular interest in concrete structures, lush facades, and getaway properties that blur the line between home and vacation.

Modern concrete homes that make the case for material

Concrete is a recurring thread in Bernard’s reporting, not as a cold, industrial choice but as a versatile material for warm, livable homes.

In her Dwell roundup “35 Modern Homes That Make the Case for Concrete,” she surveys a wide range of concrete residences, highlighting how form, texture, and thoughtful detailing can turn an elemental material into inviting everyday spaces. The feature moves across different climates and contexts, using short, precise descriptions to show how each project handles light, privacy, and indoor–outdoor flow through concrete rather than treating it as a monolithic aesthetic.

That material-forward lens also carries into her feature work, where she returns to concrete houses to explore how curves, courtyards, and framing views affect how people use and inhabit these properties.

Curving concrete beach houses and coastal escapes

Bernard often focuses on coastal homes where architecture is tuned to sun, views, and relaxed living, rather than pure spectacle. In her Dwell story on a curving concrete beach house in Baja, she treats the structure’s sweeping form as a way to choreograph lounging, shade, and sightlines to the water, positioning the home as both a piece of sculpture and a functional retreat for everyday use.

Her coastal features typically balance photos with concise narrative, explaining how specific design decisions - like the curve of a wall or the placement of outdoor rooms - shape how residents move through the property and spend their time there. Across these pieces, she returns to the idea of “mandatory” leisure as a design outcome: homes that are explicitly planned around rest, socializing, and an easy relationship with the surrounding landscape.

Floating plants facades and lush modern exteriors

Landscape and planting are central to Bernard’s stories, especially where greenery becomes part of the architecture itself. In her Dwell feature “More Than A Hundred ‘Floating’ Plants Form The Front Of This Vietnamese Home,” she focuses on a house whose facade is defined by dense, elevated planting, treating the green front as both a privacy screen and a living, changing exterior. Her writing on this project explains how the planter modules and structure work together, emphasizing practical considerations like shade and ventilation alongside the visual impact of a layered, “floating” garden.

She returns to similar territory in pieces on homes such as Harvest House and Beryl, where lush planting, outdoor courtyards, and carefully framed views are as important to the story as the interior finishes. In these articles, the real estate angle is inseparable from environmental design: the property is presented as an ecosystem, not just a building.

High-design retreats, cabins, and out-of-office living

Bernard extends her real estate coverage into hospitality and travel-adjacent properties, focusing on homes and rentals that function as high-design retreats.

In Dwell’s “Out of Office: This High-Design Retreat in Portugal,” she profiles a destination where the architecture is designed to support deliberate disconnection, framing the property as a complete experience rather than a list of amenities. Her work also touches cabins and compact dwellings highlighted among Dwell’s most popular homes, including a 330-square-foot cabin that demonstrates how careful planning and character can make small-footprint living aspirational rather than austere. These stories often link architectural choices - like generous glazing, minimal interiors, or tucked-away workspaces - to the emotional tenor of staying there, casting real estate as a tool for rest, escape, or a different rhythm of work and life.

Outside Dwell, she writes for travel-focused outlets such as Condé Nast Traveler, bringing the same emphasis on setting, atmosphere, and designed experience to coverage that spans hotels, getaways, and design-led destinations.

Roundups, features, and editorial strategy

Bernard moves comfortably between single-property features and broader roundups, using both formats to build a coherent picture of contemporary residential design.

Her roundups, such as the concrete homes collection, organize multiple projects around a clear editorial thesis, making it easy to see patterns in how architects and homeowners approach materials and lifestyle across different markets. Her individual home profiles tend to be tightly structured, combining visual storytelling with short, direct explanations of key design moves, which reflects her broader role as an editorial strategist shaping narratives around architecture and real estate.

Across these pieces, she consistently foregrounds how design decisions translate into daily routines - lounging, working remotely, hosting, or retreating - rather than treating homes as static showcases, which distinguishes her coverage from more purely decorative or market-driven real estate reporting.