The Autonomous Tent is available to book for $495 plus tax per night. To make a reservation, visit the Treebones Resort website.
The family retreat abuts a rocky cliff in Herfell, Norway. The central cabin provides communal living spaces, while the two cabins that flank it are used as private sleeping quarters.
According to Remijnse, since the only direction they could build on the small site was up, they decided to add height with a gabled roof.
The building takes advantage of passive heating and cooling, thanks to Blee and Halligan's strategic design to capture the most sunlight in the winter and provide the most shade in the summer. The above-ground glass facade faces east and draws in the daylight, but when the sun proves too strong, whoever is staying in the structure can close the internal shutters to beat the heat.
Deep eaves prevent the entrance from being buried in snow. The clients can see directly into the valley and mountains below.
This 191-square-foot cabin near Vancouver and its glass facades "forces you to engage with the bigger landscape," architect Tom Kundig says, but it seals up tight when its owner is away. The unfinished steel cladding slides over the windows, turning it into a protected bunker. Read the full story here.
For the Knoxville-based CEO of environmentally-focused marketing firm the Shelton Group, building an off-the-grid lakefront pavilion in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, wasn’t so simple. With the help of architect Brandon Pace, she built a small prefabricated cabin on a “funky piece of property” on Norris Lake, a man-made reservoir.
Before building on the North Island of New Zealand, two friends spent years replanting the site. The 290-square-foot structures Cheshire Architects designed for them reject the local trend of oversize beach houses—instead, they sit on the landscape like a pair of minimalist sculptures.
When she visits the Watershed, Kathleen's writing accoutrements are limited to paper and pencil.
Erin Moore of FLOAT Architectural Research and Design, based in Tucson, Arizona, designed a 70-square-foot writer’s retreat in Wren, Oregon, for her mother, Kathleen Dean Moore, a nature writer and professor of philosophy at nearby Oregon State University. The elder Moore wanted a small studio in which to work and observe the delicate wetland ecosystem on the banks of the Marys River. Enlisting her daughter’s design expertise, her professor husband’s carpentry savoir faire, the aid of friends, and a front loader, Kathleen and her crew erected the structure in September 2007. Photo by Gary Tarleton. Totally off the grid—–Kathleen forgoes the computer and writes by hand when there—–the Watershed was designed to tread as lightly on the fragile ecosystem as the wild turkeys and Western pond turtles that live nearby. “
Jaanus Orgusaar's NOA cabin in the Virumaa region of northeast Estonia. The structure rests on three feet, so it doesn't require a foundation.
The interior of Jaanus Orgusaar's NOA cabin in the Virumaa region of Estonia. The wide windows provide a great view of the surroundings.
A shipping container is perfectly sized to serve as a tiny guesthouse, as San Antonio artist Stacey Hill finds.
Architect Tom Kundig’s assignment was simple enough: Build a tiny, Thoreau-like getaway for an Atlanta-based writer who owned ten acres on San Juan Island in Puget Sound. "The idea was not to clutter anybody’s thinking, especially a writer’s," he said. So he designed a 500-square-foot retreat that’s both womblike and open to its surroundings.
A small shipping container home in New Plymouth, New Zealand, features a retractable porch.