Every year the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors bestows an award upon the world's best residential property. This year, 12 homes competed for the crown, with an overall winner taking the coveted top spot. From a gleaming golden kitchen to the world’s best roof extension, step inside these high temples of interior design and prepare to be truly wowed...

This jaw-dropping project saw the regeneration and total transformation of a dilapidated outhouse in Ahmedabad, India into an imaginative home that looks totally unique. Brought back from the brink of ruin, the shell has been transformed into a sleek interior space, using vibrant red tiles that 'spill' between a formal living area and a recreational space with a hot tub and splash pool.

Inside, this curved metal unit forms the bases for a futuristic kitchen and media centre, with the other side fitted with an integrated oven, recessed countertops and hidden storage. Architects HSC Designs wanted to create a connection between the building and the outdoors so wall-to-wall glass was used to create a new frontage for the building.

The clients that approached Neil Cownie Architects wanted to create a family home that drew on the modernist history of 1960s suburban Perth. Roscommon House uses classic mid-century materials such as wood cladding and poured concrete to create textures that run through all the interior spaces. Even the glazing got the modernist treatment, with a Mondrian-inspired window overlooking the garden.

The house's undulating design carries the exterior concrete finish inside, where the timber grain effect really stands out. A double-height atrium accentuates the linear pattern of the cladding and shows off the high-end luxury furnishings. Several Eames lounge chairs with ottomans are on view with plenty of bespoke, custom-made pendant lights and internal greenery. It's a wonderful home that's earned its place on the shortlist.

This beautiful Mumbai apartment, which sits within a renovated 1930s Art Deco building, manages to mix heritage Bombay elements with a thoroughly modern aesthetic. Industrial-style shelving and warm wooden accents make this kitchen a knockout, with trailing greenery and panelled glass doors adding to its vintage charm.

Sympathetically developed by architects Squareworks, details of the building's past such as the brass switches in the kitchens and the panelling that appears throughout the apartment are preserved and worked into the decor. It feels light, airy and cool without losing any of its golden age magic. Love this? See more amazing Art Deco homes you can live in. 

Shortlisted property Yat-Sen by architects Shang Yi Interior Design Co in Taiwan is every part the pared-back, nature-inspired home. Designer Chia Hung Yu wanted to add a sense of avant-garde and fashion to the space, whilst connecting the homeowners to the natural world through the use of raw materials.

While the exposed concrete takes centre stage in this most minimal of spaces, glass has also been used to great effect to bring light into the interior space, with stainless steel grids adding a thoroughly modern feel. The designer also wanted to incorporate natural textures through the use of rusted iron on some interior surfaces, creating a stylish, sophisticated home that's the envy of the world. 

Located in the tropical paradise of Jakarta, the visionaries at Genius Loci studied the path of the sun for a whole year before designing this property's layout. UV blinds in this living area offer protection from the sun's rays, while the contemporary grey cladding mirrors the horizontal lines all the way up to the double-height ceiling. Luxury finishes through the property included hand-selected stone and beautifully crafted wooden cladding, which separates and unifies different sections.

The house is designed with the main living spaces located on the first floor, with a garage, staff accommodation and a room dedicated to the owner's shoe collection on the ground floor. On the first floor, sliding glass walls open up the interior space to a beautifully designed garden and pool area. An upper floor extends over the poolside decking area to offer shade and privacy.

As its name suggests, Playland takes an imaginative approach to interior design. The turquoise hinged walls move to allow a number of layouts, opening up to create one huge room or closing off sleeping areas where pull-down beds spring out of the walls. The bespoke furniture, too, is designed to encourage experimentation and can be pushed together or separated in a huge variety of ways. "The atmosphere of the space," says architect Wei Yi, "is just like a piece of music with high and low pitch notes, rich in rhythm."

The playful approach extends to the unexpected sculptures, the recessed clock cast into the concrete wall and the oversized mirror in the bathroom. But despite this game-on attitude, the approach to quality is deadly serious with gorgeous marble, sleek finishes and minimal designer furnishings completing this East-meets-West conundrum of a home.

This modest open-plan loft was shortlisted for its ingenious approach to small-space design. The property was still in the planning stages when the owners contacted Stephanie Kasel to conceptualise their home. They wanted her to add personality and maximise the limited size with functional design solutions. To that end, toughened glass panels were used to section off a home office from the living area and the main wall was removed to make way for this ingenious double-sided cabinet.

On the flip side of the cabinet, there's a display case for the namesake Stormtrooper statue, which becomes a playful focal point as you enter the apartment. The same technique was also used to create a custom dressing area behind a bespoke bedhead in the master bedroom, turning a limited space into a useful part of this hardworking home. Love this? Check out these 51 smart ideas for tiny living.

The brief for Taiwanese studio Wei Yi Design was to create a pared-back and calm home for a retired couple in Taipei to relax and enjoy a slower pace of life in Beitou, a mountainous district recognised for its natural hot springs and expanses of greenery. To this effect, picture view windows take centre stage in the minimalist interior which pays homage to the natural surroundings. The walls are lightly burnished with gold leaf to emulate a weathered look and the use of cypress wood adds a calm, cabin-like feel to the home.

The brief was to give the home a minimalist feel that would provide a window to the beauty outside, so glazing and light play a central role in this design. A curved, bold wall in the centre forms a corridor-like space that plays with proportion and there is also an authentic Japanese tatami room, where the couple can meditate, unwind and drink tea together. "In this space, time slows down and life is tranquil here," says lead designer of the project, Fang Shin-Yan.

Melbourne-based architect Rob Mills transformed a former cardboard factory into a decadent family home filled with inspiring design ideas. The house makes unexpected use of bold materials, most evident in the brass kitchen, with golden touches appearing throughout on doorways and bathroom fittings too. Not only does the gleaming brass qualify this as the world's best kitchen island, but it also warms the stone, marble and stucco walls and lifts the decor into the realm of the divine.

Stone floors, sourced from a quarry in Verona, run throughout the house bouncing light around the interior space. Coupled with the huge 3.4-metre ceilings, these featuers make the rooms feel extraordinarily big and bright. The house layout is practical too, with the main living area on the first floor and a self-contained two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor that can be rented out.

Built on top of an apartment building in an upmarket urban district of Brussels, Lincoln is a 140-square-metre roof extension that's practically invisible from the street. Filled with beautiful materials, elegant design and stunning furnishings, it might easily qualify as the world's most beautiful extension and was highly commended at the World Festival of Interiors. 

Taking full advantage of the dreamy Brussels skyline, floor-to-ceiling windows and a roof that opens up connect the inside space with the terrace outside. Inside, the living space has been thoughtfully configured to include neat storage space and a cool mid-century mix of white walls and natural wood flooring and cabinetry.

A clever partition zones out a working kitchen space and creates a corridor to link to the bedrooms behind. The interior make-up uses ceramics, concrete, wood, cement and composite marble to add texture to every surface, creating a warm and comfortable feeling throughout.

Very Studio and Che Wang Architects achieved tremendous results when they overhauled an ordinary apartment in the bustling city of Taichung. Located in a typical Taiwanese housing block, the original space suffered from boxy rooms, bad acoustics, light problems and a space that felt very claustrophobic to its inhabitants. The result is a totally reimagined space, unrecognisable from its humble beginnings.

The first problem to overcome was the layout; the homeowners wanted the new areas to flow into one another seamlessly. Thus a pentagon design was conceived, where the individual spaces overlap and interplay. Multiple walls were taken down from the middle and new walls were set at various angles blooming out from the centre. To offer a little more privacy, the bedrooms have been set back from the main open-plan living areas.

The dramatic domed ceiling was born out of a necessity to control the sound through the space. The division of a large area into small pods provides better acoustics and creates auditory privacy as you move through the building. The furniture chosen for the home has a soft and curved, undulating design to emulate that of the apartment itself. Everything is fluid and connected.

The judges were so impressed that they named the apartment as the best residential property. "[It's] a refreshing take on the spatial organisation of a typical unit flat," one of the judges commented. “A well-researched acoustically designed ceiling which enhances the lightness of this inviting space." It is certainly a deserved winner and a tremendous feat in residential architecture.

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