Modern architecture can be a break with the past, an opportunity to shed some of the cultural baggage of traditional styles. When my parents, Sylvia Balderrama and John Morley, were rebuilding their decaying family Adirondack cabin, going modern meant breaking free of both local clichés and some of the strictures of my somewhat severe ancestors. My great-grandfather, a semi-itinerant Methodist minister, originally followed a church leader to summer in a rural area by Lake Champlain, where a group of fellow ministers camped in small cabins that were less like shore resorts and more like monastic retreats—no indoor bathrooms, hot water, or any other decadent amenities. Even interior doors were frowned upon because of what naughty hijinks could happen behind them. (Playing cards was forbidden, to say nothing of more mature activities.)

But after years of ad hoc additions, upgrades, and repairs, my parents’ cabin had sinking floors, leaning door frames, and innumerable cracks for creepy crawlies to climb inside. Having endured enough rustic charm, and thanks to some inherited money from my late grandfather, a professor, they were ready for a sleeker house that wouldn’t collect so much dust and dirt and might, perhaps, have doors. Architects Jacob Esocoff and Henry Ng of New York firm Ideas of Order and contractor Mike Sherman of Bessboro Builders created for them what is on one hand a pretty standard cabin—a wooden box covered by a pitched metal roof—and on the other is an anomaly clad in oversize plywood shingles and filled with sleek surfaces that hide hardware and details. Not only are there doors, but elegantly detailed ones with hidden hinges. Mexican alebrijes (animal figurines) and textiles weave in my mother’s heritage, and Japanese pottery and paintings bring in splashes of my father’s history of growing up in Japan. A modern house, my parents learned, doesn’t have to be totally detached from traditions. Instead, it can learn from the past and frame new traditions worth keeping.

Out With the Old

John Morley: Georgia Harkness was a famous Methodist theologian up here, and she was renting places out. This whole area was initially populated a lot by Methodist ministers who didn’t have any money, and so they bought cheap little shacks and just worked on them on their own. Our previous abode here was old and needed extensive work to make it more livable. It was starting to shift—

Sylvia Balderrama: Sink.

JM: …because that house was just built on stones. The only way to make it more livable would be to tear it down and put in a foundation and rebuild it. I’m not a believer in saving old architecture. Everything is transitory. And I think in some ways people resist that. They want their life to go on forever. So you want to think that there are some things that are permanent. It gives you some security. But I think things come and they go, and that’s fine. And I was tired of working on these houses, so my preference was to do something new.

SB: For me, having married into this family, I wanted something that was ours. I wanted it to be part of me, too. We both knew we didn’t want the quintessential Adirondack cabin, because they seem dark, and we don’t want animal heads on the walls.

JM: And they remind me of Wall Street executive retreats and rich people who come up here and sit by the fire or whatever.

SB: We did not want the beadboard…

JM: …knotty pine, logs, all that kind of stuff. I’ve seen knotty pine for the past fifty or sixty years. I’ve lived with it. I’ve had to repair it. I’ve seen it get destroyed by carpenter ants. I don’t want knotty pine.

SB: Working with Henry and Jacob opened up a whole realm of possibility of what could actually be redone.

Brooklyn designer Alvaro Ucha Rodriguez sits on a foldable desk that my great-grandfather used as a traveling minister." layout="" credit="Photo by Will Pippin" photoUserId="7389046720225906688"/>

In With the New (and Old)

Henry Ng: Building a house that really felt like it was rooted in its environment, rooted in its history, was an important part of the design agenda. Part of the reason why the house is a vernacular form that’s widely used is because it’s very simple to build. And that actually kept the construction relatively inexpensive, because it’s built with very standard American framing. No steel beams, no steel structure, all timber structure. It’s all standard framing, but we were trying to get interesting spaces using that system of construction.

So much is great about the way people have built in this area for so many generations. So we thought we should take a lot of what’s great about it, do it in a way that we felt was interesting, and pay homage.

We thought about ways to do a rustication in the lens of a log cabin, but with this more contemporary system of marine-plywood shingles that play with that big scale.

“We both knew we didn’t want the quintessential Adirondack cabin, because they seem dark, and we don’t want animal heads on the walls.”
—Sylvia Balderrama, resident

Reframing the Present

Mike Sherman: The facade is unusual. I had never done big sheets of plywood siding before that, which was, I think, a unique design.

HN: It’s probably much less expensive than your typical charred cedar siding. The fact that we could work together with the contractor to get the design feature out of a few simple moves of carpentry was something we were very lucky and happy with.

The carpentry is so much a part of the local knowledge of how they build. Mike’s team was just very, very talented and very interested in doing ambitious things. So when we worked out how we would hang the shingles, they realized it’s actually not complicated.

Jacob Esocoff: When you look at the facade and you see these four-by-sixes, they’re very common. They’re in every lumber yard. Or the six-by-sixes that hold up the house on the entry side—if you space them just right and you have the right proportion, they really take on this monumental, almost Greek temple feel to them. But they’re still the same components that are everywhere around you.

MS: It’s pretty much standard framing.

SB: In Mexican culture, you don’t want to stand out, because if you stand out, you attract people’s jealousy or envy or whatever, and that brings a curse on you. I don’t ever think of this place as a showpiece per se. It’s the setting for what happens.

MS: I would say it’s probably the furthest thing from an Adirondack cabin I’ve ever built. I’ve never seen anything like that before up here. But in its way I think that it fits.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Ideas of Order / @ideasoforderstudio

Builder: Bessboro Builders, Inc

Kitchen Cabinetry: Coquo

MEP Engineering: Level Up Engineering

Structural Engineering: Chris Iftime

Lighting Design: Dagmara Nowak

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Go Modern or Traditional? My Family’s Adirondack Cabin Proves You Don’t Have to Pick