The best thing about vacation is not the range of choices offered—where to go, which restaurants to try, which hotel to stay in—but the limitations imposed. Our wardrobes are cordoned off to what we can cram in a suitcase, our libraries limited to a couple of books, and our toiletries stuffed into a Dopp kit. The fewer choices we have, the more freedom there is to do what we’re supposed to be doing on vacation: nothing much. These carry-on-size vacation houses demonstrate this ethos. Through striking design, they illustrate relaxation through restraint, liberation through limitations, and the luxury of living a life (or at least a holiday) distilled.
Sunset Cabin
Lake Simcoe, Ontario
As the Griswold family taught us in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, sometimes you need a vacation from the vacation itself. The owners of the Sunset Cabin in Lake Simcoe, Ontario, could relate. “They were having up to 15 overnight visitors at a time,” explains architect Michael Taylor of Taylor Smyth Architects in Toronto. “They wanted an escape, a little place near the water where they could watch the sunset from their bed.”
They also wanted to have minimal impact on the natural environment in the process. “We built it like a piece of furniture,” says Taylor. Working with a local Toronto wood mill, he and his team prefabricated the one-room wooden sleeping box and then dismantled it. They then shipped all the parts and put it back together on-site in under ten days.
The result is a 275-square-foot wood-and-glass box that hovers lightly above the lakeshore. The walls with views are composed entirely of glass, augmented with an exterior horizontal cedar screen that both braces the structure from twisting and filters bright summer light. At night, the effect is reversed—electric interior light illuminates the cabin like a lantern. Window cutouts in the cedar screen fulfill the couple’s single request: a bedside view of nightly sunsets.
By virtue of the limited space, the interior is minimalist—all of the surfaces are constructed of birch veneer plywood including the built-in cabinets. The east façade opens to a cedar-screened outdoor shower and chemical compost toilet; the west side opens to a small deck, which, at grade and unimpeded by handrails, spills out to the horizon in an infinity-pool-like effect.
“Another benefit of being close to the lake,” explains Taylor, “is that you can now see the property—the wilderness—in a whole new way. New sounds, new views, foxes on the lake in wintertime—the kinds of things that they never knew existed before.”
The Tube
Granite, Colorado
Projecting from a rocky bluff in rural Colorado, the Tube stares out over the landscape like the open shutter of a camera, its huge aperture cataloging the environment below. “That was kind of the goal,” explains Ron Mason, the Tube’s designer and principal of Anderson Mason Dale Architects, “to make it feel like you were inside a lens, looking out.”
For Mason, “tube” refers not to the structure’s shape, but rather to its orientation in the landscape. It faces the upper Arkansas River, which, from the living room, appears as though it is rushing right at you.
The entire house is a scant 16 feet wide and 50 feet long—the front half dedicated to the open kitchen and living room, which both face a massive wall-sized window. The back half offers a simple bed and bath. Throughout the interior, exposed southern yellow pine walls and ceilings serve as a low-impact frame for window views. In warm seasons, the top half of the 15-by-9 foot living room window slides open to create an en-plein-air counter on which to eat, drink, or just stare and breathe in the mountains.
To integrate the Tube into its natural surroundings, Mason clad the exterior in corrugated cold rolled steel sprayed with salt water to hasten the rusting process.
As the structure ages, it patinates, appearing deeply weathered and resembling the sun-and-ice rock formations of the craggy landscape. “It’s very rural out there, the only access is off an old stagecoach road,” says Mason. “And when I’m there,
I never see a soul.”
Villa/Gallery
Karuizawa, Japan
For most of us, a cabin’s interior conjures images of bark-laden walls, burl tables, and taxidermied deer heads—indoor reminders of the great outdoors. Architect Makoto Yamaguchi also brings the outside inside in his Karuizawa, Japan, cabin, but with a wholly modern approach.
Along a rock-and-tree-lined bluff in the rural mountains about one and a half hours outside Tokyo, Yamaguchi’s Villa/Gallery is angular and distinctly inorganic, a space-pod-style cabin that clearly distinguishes itself from the natural environment—popping from the earth like an exclamation point. Painted bright white, the walls and roof are fiber-reinforced plastic. Once inside, however, the Villa/Gallery reveals a different quality.
With the interior almost completely bare, a razor-sharp horizon line is visible from each room, leaving the views from the wall-size windows completely unobstructed. Both the kitchen and bath are sunken below floor level, and outfitted with glass, mirrored, or polished stainless steel finishes. The lack of accoutrements creates a perception of space in the little (737-square-foot) structure. The effect is focused and crystalline, allowing the wilderness to flood through the cabin uninterrupted—like a cyclorama of enormous plasma screen TVs all tuned in to the same stunning nature show.
