Having lived in apartments her entire life, Michelle Abadi relished the idea of finally owning a home in a quiet, nature-rich community. As a wedding and events planner for a beach resort in the popular town of José Ignacio, Uruguay, Abadi spends half the year near her work and the other half in her hometown of Buenos Aires. So, once she found a perfect plot of land in the Uruguayan neighborhood of La Juanita, she reached out to Uruguay- and Brazil-based architects MAPA on social media to help realize her life-long dream.

“Michelle chose to build her house in La Juanita for its exclusivity and tranquility, its beautiful beaches, its 150-hectare pine forest, and its excellent gastronomic offer,” explain the architects of the seaside neighborhood within José Ignacio. “La Juanita has become a small community of people who share an interest in a sophisticated and comfortable lifestyle, but at the same time it's austere and in full bond with the natural environment.”

“The cabin was designed with the goal of being a cozy and warm retreat with a strong relationship with the surrounding forests,” continue the architects. “The foremost objective was to make a compact house with an efficient, clean, and low-impact construction process.” In order to meet all of these design goals in a relatively quick amount of time, Abadi readily agreed to MAPA’s prefabrication methods.

The architects designed the cabin with a pair of steel-framed modules—each measuring nine by four meters—prefabricated in three months at a Montevideo factory. Once transported to the site, installation only took six hours with the help of a crane. A glazed connection that links the twin components was built on-site in three days.

“The most interesting place in the house is the glazed space between the two modules,” says MAPA of one of their favorite features in the project. “When designing the house, we found it important to have this ambiguous and undefined space that makes a transition between the outside and the inside, the intimate and the social, the natural and the built.”

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The glazed connection neatly divides the 840-square-foot home into two zones: The “private” module to the left of the entrance houses two bedrooms and two baths; the “public” module on the other features an open-plan living area, dining room, and kitchen with large sliding doors that open up to the forest outside.

A Timber-Clad Prefab Cabin Offers Respite in the Canadian Wilderness

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: MAPA / @mapaarq

Builder/ General Contractor: iHouse