Farmhouse

“When you’re working on something inexpensive and then decide you don’t like it, fine. You’re not tearing down millions of kroners worth of work.” —Mette Lyng Hansen

"It only cost about $48,000 to build, which was incredibly cheap," says Turner of the Stealth Barn. "We got the Timber Frame Company to supply the shell, then we clad it and fitted out the interior and windows ourselves. The idea was to take the archetypal black tar-painted agricultural building and make an almost childlike icon of that."

On an 18th-century farmstead in rural Sweden, two Copenhagen designers have handcrafted a summerhouse that seamlessly melds the modern and the traditional. The simple, pared-down aesthetic and the open-ended time frame of the project—along with the pair's building and design skills—helped Mads Odgård and Lyng Hansen achieve their renovation on a miniscule budget, with a project outline that ebbed and flowed with Odgård’s professional successes in product design.

Inside, the custom-built casework and splashes of blue and red stand out. Jurkovič designed a central "service box" on the ground floor, so open space wraps around the plywood-encased core which contains the kitchen, bathroom, toilet, stairs, and storage.

The client requested a porch, so Givone built one with columns made of anodized aluminum, the same material used in the siding of the addition, and stainless steel cables. "Even though it's a traditional, covered porch, it has very modern materials," he says.

The modern staircase was built with the same salvaged wall planks that are used as flooring throughout.

The house’s new lime plaster walls, seen here in the courtyard, contrast with the old brick wall that divides the house from Kolasiński’s adjoining carpentry shop. Though the house itself is small, the outdoor spaces and furniture studio bring its total square footage to nearly 11,000 square feet.