Portland photographer Shawn Records knew it as soon as he saw it, like a picture waiting to be taken: This seven-acre property was the one. On the edge of the Coast Range about 10 miles east of the Pacific Ocean near Tillamook, Oregon, a hillside forest of bigleaf maples, aspen, and massive ponderosa pines gives way to a grassy meadow and little Beaver Creek; it’s an entire little ecosystem.

For Shawn and his wife Jenny, it would take the right house—compact and transparent—to not spoil this natural setting, which the couple dubbed the “magic woods.”

“The cabin is great,” Shawn says, sitting at its long dining table as light pours in from both the north and south facades (even on an overcast day). “But it’s not just about the cabin. It’s about this,” he adds, gesturing with a wave of his hand to the natural setting outside, “as much as that.”

Shawn and Jenny both grew up in Idaho, and they spent summers camping or staying in extended family members’ lakeside cabins. Living in Portland, nature is always a close drive away, but the couple missed cabin life, and the experience of returning to a natural setting time and time again.

It’s no wonder that they began to regularly spend time on their property long before ground was broken on the Beaver Creek Cabin itself. Shawn began creating trails through the woods, and he even dragged old thrift store furniture to the ends of different paths, in the spirit of the follies associated with English gardens. At one trail’s end, he even configured a makeshift metal tub and connected a very long hose to the house: an ersatz hot tub in the forest.

The cabin’s design, by Outside Architecture, was generated largely over beers, because the firm’s founder Jeremy Spurgin is Shawn and Jenny’s next-door neighbor back in Portland. But it was only when Spurgin visited the site that the design really came together.

“We flew the drone up and got a better understanding of the site—how much shade would be on this part of the property on a sunny day,” the architect recalls.

At first, the couple wanted to build the house in the middle of the meadow they’d already fallen in love with, right against the woods. Spurgin convinced them to “pull the cabin north to get more sun, and create an outdoor room between the cabin and the magic woods,” he explains. That moved the house closer to the road, but an alder grove just beyond the house still provides privacy.

The cabin’s basic form is traditional—particularly its pitched roof, which looks a bit like a Monopoly game piece. But a few design moves—from the walls of glass on either side to the carved-out covered patio—make it feel crisply contemporary.

“We drew a boring building, and Shawn and I said, ‘This would actually work,’” Spurgin recalls with a chuckle. “But then we said, ‘Now we want to make it sexy.’”

The house has decks on both sides, but the covered deck on the south side is what really extends the home’s square footage—it serves as a hybrid indoor/outdoor space.

A photo Shawn took of Jenny relaxing there with coffee and a book “just epitomizes what we were trying to do,” Spurgin adds. “She’s outside and can see the deer, a bobcat, or the birds, but be protected—because it’s raining half the time.”

But the deck is also practical, acting as a kind of outdoor mudroom where the family can leave their groceries or take their shoes off before entering the space.

“It’s the most architecturally striking feature,” Spurgin says. “We took a really simple gabled roof—a square with a pitched roof—and carved the porch out of that form. The porch isn’t tacked on. And the house is such a small little footprint—820 square feet—that this became an exercise in ‘How can we make a very small cabin feel as big as possible?’”

Although the square footage is modest, the cabin’s interior feels surprisingly expansive. Outside Architecture collaborated with Catena Consulting Engineers’ Jason Thompson on a structural plan that kept the vaulted ceiling exposed by reinforcing the roof with a structural ridge beam and side trusses.

“I wanted to look up and see the ceiling, and into both lofts,” Spurgin says. “There are no visual structural impediments to your eye going across all 48 feet of the interior. That was a big thing. When you’re in there, it’s small—but it breathes. It’s not four walls and an eight-foot ceiling. It’s really tall and volumetric, like a church.”

The walls of glass on the north and south sides can fold away, creating a surprisingly wide-open feel—almost as if one could drive a car through the middle of the house. The transparency also allows Jenny and Shawn to preserve the feeling they enjoyed before the house was built: sitting in the meadow, their back to the woods, looking down the hillside toward the street. Now they can actually look from the back meadow through the house itself.

That wide-open interior—with a double-height living room bookended by walls of glass and bedrooms and lofts on either side—also charms, thanks to Shawn and Jenny’s eye for curation.

Along the walls are vintage books about forestry and Pacific Northwest ecology selected by Jenny, and a long, sliding library ladder Shawn found used. There are also old children’s toys, a collection of kitschy teacups and saucers, and even an unopened Wheaties cereal box featuring one of Shawn’s basketball heroes: hall of famer Clyde Drexler.

But the pièce de résistance may be a salvaged Belvedere MO12 Mondo salon chair that, with its leather and bent wood, looks like it could have been designed by Charles and Ray Eames.

Owning a cabin in the woods isn’t all relaxation and wonder. Shawn has a busy schedule teaching photography at three different Portland-area colleges, and on the day I visited, he had driven there to oversee the septic tank being emptied. “Sometimes I will initially dread leaving my day-to-day life to come out here. And there’s work I have here too: trail work, weed-whacking,” he says. “But at the same time, every time I’ve ever come here, ten minutes later I feel better. I’m happier.”

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Outside Architecture / @outside_arch

Builder: Dale Stewart Construction & Design

Structural Engineering: Catena Consulting Engineers

Cabinetry: Spacecraft PDX