Holiday Homes

This boutique hotel on Norway's Manshausen Island is made up of four sea cabins—one of which juts out from a natural ledge. Each of them fit two to four travelers or a family of five.

Tiny homes have officially become a thing—and these woodsy getaways will make you want to downsize ASAP.

A lone saguaro marks the southwest corner of Thomas and Laura Hyland’s property, which is situated adjacent to the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. The structure’s main living volume is elevated and faced in glass, overlooking a descending pathway that leads to a pool tucked into the site.

Transforming shipping containers into habitable spaces is a growingly popular subset of prefab. Just off the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Martha Moseley and Bill Mathesius adapted an unused concrete foundation to create a home made from 11 stacked shipping containers. "We were inspired by the site, and our desire to have something cool and different," says Moseley.

Katie and Danny MacNelly met as University of Virginia architecture students and started their own practice, ARCHITECTUREFIRM, along with another former UVA classmate. Together, the couple designed and built their family’s country retreat, a three-volume residence near Virginia’s James River.

“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.”

Oskar and Karl, 12 and 9, share breakfast at their family’s summer getaway in Sweden. The table is from ILVA, and the CH36 chairs by Hans Wegner are from Carl Hansen & Søn.

Suzanne and Brooks Kelley at the back of their 1,100-square-foot guest cottage.

The weeHouse exteriors are clad in corrugated Cor-Ten, but with a custom pattern of folds to create an organic randomness. The foundations were designed with a shallow recess around the top to make the modules look like they’re hovering. After they bought the property in early 2014, the Siegels camped there for two summers while they saved up money and planned a permanent structure. In his research, BJ came across this design, a customizable prefab house by Alchemy Architects. "Of all the things that I found, I was drawn to that one because it was absolutely the simplest and cleanest," he says.

Florida couple John Pirman and Steve Tetreault built a new house inspired by the Sarasota School. Today’s FEMA codes required a plinth to lift the house five-and-a-half feet above grade and a roof that can withstand hurricane wind loads, making it a challenge to re-create the lightness of midcentury design, Pirman says.

In realizing their dream to build a country retreat in upstate New York, Sandy Chilewich and Joe Sultan—proprietors of the textiles firm Chilewich|Sultan—eschewed a mountainous view for an understated wooded plot. At 800 square feet, the flat-roofed home is a modest structure for the expansive 10-acre property.

For Gabriel Ramirez and his partner Sarah Mason Williams, following the Sea Ranch rules—local covenants guide new designs—didn’t mean slipping into Sea Ranch clichés. The architects love Cor-Ten steel, with its ruddy and almost organic surface, and they made it the main exterior material, along with board-formed concrete and ipe wood. The Cor-Ten, which quickly turned an autumnal rust in the sea air, and the concrete, with its grain and crannies, mean the house isn’t a pristine box, Ramirez says. His Neutra house “was very crisp and clean,” he says. “This house is more distressed, more wabi-sabi.”

Lawrence Weiner sits at his daylit desk. The bare walls are perfect for tacking up new projects, and the steel ductwork gives the space an industrious feel.

Located in Chicago’s West Town, the concrete shell of Upton’s Naturals headquarters was erected in just 48 hours.

Inspired by the small scale of Japanese residences—in particular, Makoto Masuzawa’s 1952 Minimum House—architect Andrew Simpson designed his own economical 538-square-foot home set into a wooded site in Island Bay, a coastal suburb outside Wellington, New Zealand.

“When you’re doing a second home, a lot of the character of the design is defined by what it isn’t,” says architect Greg Howe, as a way of explaining the minimalistic approach that was taken on this Michigan weekend home. “If you think of it as cold, you have to remember, the setting, and accessing nature, is the point.”