101 Best Modern Cabins
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(This story is composed of photographs from both Dwell and those submitted by community members. All captions are from the original contributor or source story.)
"There had been two or three primitive cabins on the property in the past, which resulted in a clearing that we utilized for the site," Joseph Herrin says. "This allowed us to avoid any further tree removal for construction, and provided an opportunity to begin to restore that portion of the property with native landscaping."
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The site needed a path that would let residents easily ascend from the bank to the house. The architects created one by simply replicating the way they had naturally walked up the site the first time they visited. The result is a meandering trail that directs visitors to the landscape’s different features — whether a majestic Arbutus tree, a private stone beach, or a wildflower clearing.
A polychrome facade made of salvaged, 100-year-old barnwood gives this small, lofted cottage space its unique character. Its copper roof is also reclaimed, a lucky Craigslist find from a local remodel. Though the structure has a footprint of just 11' x 14', it provides a useful space to entertain, catch up on work, or relax.
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.
Rolling Huts (Winthrop, United States)A series of six modernist huts created by Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, the Rolling Huts look like rustic case study homes, a herd of designer cabins that just may exemplify the term 'glamping.' Elevated on stilts, the 200-square-foot structures offer another level of outdoor accommodation. Photos by Chad Kirkpatrick
Choosing not to make a big to-do of itself, this cottage blends in with its surroundings. A wall of glass on one end allows a merger of the outdoors with the interiors, while white trim leaves the appearance of a snow-kissed façade year-round. Berlin, Germany. By Atelier st Gesellschaft von Architekten mbHfrom the book Rock the Shack, Copyright Gestalten 2013.
Cement panels painted a plum hue clad Jason Gordon’s 1,157-square-foot cabin in the Ozark Mountains. Architect German Brun and partner Lizmarie Esparza originally specified wood, but opted for the much less expensive material from James Hardie after contractor Damian Fitzpatrick recommended it. "It was an exercise in cost engineering," Brun says.
Anna Hoover, founder of the non-profit First Light Alaska, sought a "thought refuge, a room with a view to sit and contemplate future projects and reflect on recent travels and interactions, plenty of ‘headspace’—tall ceilings—and the ability to host other artists for studio time," she says. A longtime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Hoover was familiar with the work of Olson Kundig and contacted the Seattle-based firm to design her abode.
A cantilevered cabin designed by R D Gentzler blends into the forest, even as it hovers above a 20-foot drop-off. Its south face is almost entirely glass, but a roof canopy limits solar gain. "We sit on the deck all afternoon watching the trees, and the time just flies by," says resident Maricela Salas.
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The cabin’s exterior walls and roof are clad in overlapping stone plates that mimic the look of traditional wood paneling found in Western Norway. "It provides an affinity with the cabins nearby," partner and architect Nils Ole Bae Brandtzæg explains. Solar panels cover the chimney pipe, lighting LED lamps inside.
Transformer or beach hut? Positioned in a coastal erosion zone, this holiday retreat for a family of five is completely capable of being relocated. An oversized shutter allows for protection from the elements when not in use and opens to allow sun in during the winter or provide shade on hot summer days. Waikato, New Zealand. By Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects, from the book Rock the Shack, Copyright Gestalten 2013.
Sited on a lake near Bracebridge, Ontario, this small-footprint family cottage was designed by Toronto firm superkül to integrate with its natural surroundings and minimize its environmental impact. The clients, a married couple, had mixed feelings about going completely modern with their cabin's aesthetic, so the architects created a sculptural wood form to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary. Photo by Shai Gil.
Every year Marlboro College, which is located in rural Vermont, hosts the Marlboro Music Festival in which 80 of the most prominent classical musicians join together and work to hone their craft. For seven weeks, they work, live, and rehearse together and also host select public performances. Since its inception in 1951, the program has steadily welcomed more people to participate, outgrowing its accommodations. Enter architects Joan Soranno and John Cook of HGA who developed five site-specific cabins that tread lightly on the land and respect the festival's roots. Soranno and Cook created deceptively simple-looking structures that update the regional vernacular. "In Marlboro, you get a different way of not only looking at the world, but also looking at life," stated Mitsuko Uchida, the festival's current artistic director, in a release. "If you spend weeks together, day in and day out, eating meals together, chatting and sitting around, you begin to get the basic outline of what it means to be a musician. Ultimately Marlboro is about the concept of time. We have time to rehearse and time simply to think."
Livable sculpture at its finest. Created for the Zermatt Festival, an annual festival of chamber music, this structure (designed by a team of second-year architecture students!) maximizes the beauty of its surroundings with its 720-degree spiral composition. Valais, Switzerland. By Alice Studio/Atelier de la Conception de l’ Espace from the book Rock the Shack, Copyright Gestalten 2013.
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A Norwegian boathouse. Photo Courtesy of Pasi Aalto / TASCHEN #cabin #boathouse
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.
Delta Shelter, a cabin getaway on the same property as the Rolling Huts. We visited the owner and his wife during one of our visits to get an in-person reference for Tanner Construction. It was wonderful to see the house in person after drooling over it in the pages of Tom Kundig: Houses. Photo by Tim Bies.
The father of architect Greg Dutton wished to build a cabin on the family farm, located within Appalachian Ohio and home to 400 heads of cattle. Dutton, of Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio-based Midland Architecture, presented this design as his father’s birthday present in 2012. Finished in 2014, the 900-square-foot cabin operates entirely off-the-grid.
Cedar slats mark the facade of Floating House, Doug and Becca Worple's lake house in Ontario. The architects, MOS, chose materials and shapes that wouldn’t stand out. "They’re really simple, almost Platonic forms," principal Michael Meredith says. The modest cabin has boat, a gabled roof and a cladding of untreated cedar, a material that shows up on docks and homes along Georgian Bay. "Allowing the buildings to weather seems the right thing to do," Sample says. And it’s ready for winter: Sliding barn doors seal the place up as an impenetrable box.
"This was really a parameter-driven project," explains Lukasz Kos, a Toronto-based designer and cofounder of the architecture firm Testroom. "That is, I had to let the trees decide how the tree house would be."What the trees decided, apparently, was that they wanted a gracefully slender, Blade Runner–like elevator lodged between them. They also decided they didn’t want to be too mutilated in the process. Kos responded to their needs with the low-impact 4Treehouse, a lattice-frame structure that levitates above the forest floor of Lake Muskoka, Ontario, under the spell of some witchy architectural magic.He created this effect by suspending the two-ton, 410-square-foot tree house 20 feet above the ground with steel airline cables. With only one puncture hole in each of the four trunks into which the cable is anchored, the trees get away almost entirely unscathed, and the structure attains the visual effect of being suspended weightlessly in midair. At the base of the tree, a staircase rolls on casters upon two stone slabs, allowing occupants to enter and exit regardless of how much the tree house may be swaying or rocking in the wind. Solid plywood walls punctuated by a floor of red PVC constitute the "opaque" base story, which is largely protected from the outside elements. "The idea was to have the tree house open up as it gained elevation," explains Kos. The second story is surrounded by a vertical lattice frame, allowing for breezes, air, and light to filter softly through walls while still establishing a visual perimeter between outside and inside space. At top, the tree house is completely penned in, a suspended patio with a ceiling of sky. br> br>Photo by Lukasz Kos.
Debbi Gibbs loved the seeming wilderness of the area, especially considering its relative proximity to her New York apartment. She bought a ramshackle cabin with plans to tear it down and start fresh, then bided her time until she found just the right architects. Enter Joseph Tanney and Robert Luntz of Resolution: 4 Architecture, who granted her wish for an open prefabricated structure with custom design touches.
"From the street, it appears as a rectangular building with sloping shed roofs, but this is actually an illusion," Hutchison notes. "The floor plan is actually U-shaped, wrapping around an entry courtyard that is contained by the continuous west facade." A standing seam metal roof by Custom Bilt Metals blends in with the cedar siding.
Construction during Lake Tahoe’s snowy season posed the biggest building challenge. "We shrink-wrapped the building, so the contractor could continue working through the cold of winter, sparing the expense of continuous snow removal, and limiting traces of the process on the landscape. Snowmobiles and sledges were used to bring workers and construction materials to the site." Casper says.
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. "
One of the main goals of the construction was to do as little harm as possible to the existing environment, which includes waterways that salmon depend upon. Herrin and his team created a garden roof that covers the full extent of the home to meet this objective. "This helps control storm water runoff and also replaces lost insect habitat—insects being a critical food source for juvenile salmon," he says.
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