The road leads uphill and keeps climbing, past ski slopes in the rugged heart of Norway made famous by the 1994 Winter Olympics. A light snow has been falling steadily throughout the dim morning, dampening all sound when the car slows to a stop.

As the pine trees begin to thin near the top of the mountain, a home emerges in the haze: a striking facade of rough-cut logs set in a diagonal pattern, like a pencil sketch crosshatched in contrasting shades of gray. Through a massive window, its golden interior glows warmly, beckoning travelers in from the cold.

The cabin was built by Casper and Lexie Mork-Ulnes, the duo behind Oslo- and San Francisco–based Mork Ulnes Architects. It sits about three hours north of their home in central Oslo, serving as a year-round retreat for the couple, their two children—Lucia,13, and Finn, 11—and their dog, Lupo.

“We love to ski, and with the kids at the age they are, we wanted to make the most of this time we have together,” says Lexie. A native of San Francisco, she met her Norwegian husband and partner while skiing in Tahoe. “Plus,” adds Casper, comfortable finishing Lexie’s thought after their 20 years together, “we’d been building cabins for everyone else. We wondered, why aren’t we doing this for ourselves?”

For their own cabin, the couple wanted a minimalist space that made the outdoors the focus while paying homage to the local farm buildings and log cabins that were fixtures of the landscape when Casper was growing up. And since they were the clients, they had free rein to experiment with materials and design.

“The property includes a natural grazing path for farm animals. Sheep stand under the house in summer to protect themselves from the weather.”
—Lexie Mork-Ulnes, designer and resident

The result is a 1,500-square-foot lightweight box that hovers roughly five feet above the ground on 45 wooden posts. Punched through its rough cladding are floor-to-ceiling walls of glass and an entry portal, a cubic cutout that allows views straight through the structure. The roof is covered in sod and grass in traditional rural Scandinavian style.

On one side of the portal is the main cabin, housing a mudroom, two rooms for the kids, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a principal suite complete with sauna. As you move down the hall, every open door affords an unhindered view to the outside. On the other side of the portal is a self-contained guest suite.

Smooth, light-colored pine covers every interior surface, simultaneously overwhelming and calming the senses from the first breath of its robust wood scent. Even the shower walls and the button plates for the toilet are cut in pine. The designers’ overarching idea was that nothing should distract from the views and the feeling of being outside.

In the open kitchen and living room, for instance, two 20-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling windows face each other. One provides a lookout from 3,000 feet above sea level that takes in the valley below, with its river and farmhouses, and the mountains beyond. The other window reveals the woods and meadow just outside the door.

By raising the house up off the ground, Casper and Lexie were able to get the sight lines they wanted and preserve the natural landscape underneath. Sheep gather under the house in summer. In winter, the raised aspect prevents snowdrifts from blocking the entrance.

But the characteristic that stands out the most is the skigard-style wooden screen wrapping the house. A type of rail fencing common in rural Norway, skigard is made from 10-foot-long logs that are quarter-cut into a ski-like shape, then connected, often by rope, to wood poles and set at an angle to the ground. As far as Lexie and Casper know, it has never been used on a house before.

“We liked the idea of this meticulous craft,” says Casper. “It’s rough but it’s tidy. The craftspeople who did the skigard cladding were the same ones who did the inside. So after doing this jewel box of an interior, for the siding all they used was a chainsaw and a drill.”

Ultimately, the couple approached this design and build as they would any other. “We always try to home in on a straightforward vision and resolve it in the most rigorous way we can,” says Casper. With its clean interior and quirky skin, Skigard Hytte, as they call the house, embodies both Nordic pragmatism and Californian inventiveness. It’s a fitting creation for a family and architectural studio that is firmly planted in both places.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Mork Ulnes Architects / @morkulnesarchitects

General Contractor: Hafjell Bygg

Structural Engineering: Bygg Konsulentene Øst.

Interior Design: LexieMork-Ulnes /@morkulnesarchitects

Cabinetry Fabrication: Strønes Snekkerverksted

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