Designer Scott Stultz waited a long time for the opportunity to design and build his own house from scratch—in many ways, it’s the culmination of his 30-plus-year-long career. Trained in environmental design and architecture, he has conceived custom kitchens, furniture, baths, and residential interiors as the founder of Scott A. Stultz & Associates, and as a consulting designer for other brands.

Scott and his partner, Ina Schønberg, started looking for a place to call home together while they were living in Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C. suburbs, respectively. They initially considered upstate New York, but as Ina was visiting her son in Maine, she came across a 12-acre wooded parcel for sale on Cape Rosier, near Penobscot Bay.

Coincidentally, it was just a mile away from the camp where Scott and his children had vacationed as a family for seven consecutive summers. The couple bought the property shortly after discovering it.

Scott knew he wanted to design the house. The son of a Japanese immigrant, he drew inspiration from the traditional minka (or “people’s houses,” built from the 1600s-1800s) he’d fallen in love with on his first visit to Japan as a teenager—and he and Ina named the project Shinrin No Ie, which is Japanese for “forest home.”

By coincidence, Scott was in talks with the custom cabinetry company Dutch Made about collaborating on a new kitchen series, which became known as the Katachi collection. It draws inspiration from both Japanese and Scandinavian design principles, and Scott designed Shinrin No Ie to showcase the line’s myriad possibilities. Read on to learn how the couple’s dream home came together.

Eastern Inspiration

My first design was more ambitious: The south-facing wall was serpentine, undulating between the perimeter columns that carried the roof. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to make a heroic architect's statement. I wanted something that felt like it belonged here—that is quiet, humble. I redesigned it about eight times, and each time it got a little smaller and simpler.

The root inspiration was how enchanted I was seeing Japanese folk houses during trips to Japan through the years. I thought, “This part of Maine is in some ways a lot like Japan: heavily forested and dominated by the sea.”

I kept the archetypal minka form: the really big, steep-pitched roof that’s saying, “We know that we need shelter from the elements here. They’re bigger and stronger than we are.”

But I didn’t want to mimic a minka—that would be disingenuous. So the question became, “How do I make that idea work in a place that feels like, but absolutely is not Japan?”

Pitched Roof, Timber Frame, No Knees

The roof’s steep pitch is an equilateral triangle, which is not the case with minkas. It goes back to the Western modernist influence: these pure geometries.

I decided that it really ought to be a timber frame, and I wanted the timbers to be exposed. What I did not want is to see knee bracing [also known as diagonal bracing], which is usually at a 45-degree angle and goes from a couple of feet down a post to a couple of feet out on a beam. It is utterly inelegant, and it’s not how the Japanese carpenters built traditional timber-framed houses. Everything was at 90-degree angles.

I found a guy in Vermont, Nathan Puffer from Groton Timberworks, who had spent a year in Japan studying traditional timber framing. We came up with a system where at opposite corners of the building we have horizontal girders that are mortised into those posts; that gives us our lateral shear wall support.

Knotty Pine, Elevated

Fairly early on, I decided I did not want any drywall at all. That meant white pine wall panels. And we weren’t going to spend a king’s ransom on it. So on the inside, the ceiling is all clad in one-by-ten-inch pine, with lots of knots.

I said, “This is not intended to look pristine. We’re using the materials that are available. We want it to be durable. But trees have knots in them. We’re not trying to build a Greek temple. We’re building something that feels like it really belongs here in the woods.”

We decided to use a dark stain on the exposed interior timber frame and that steep-pitched ceiling. I didn’t think it would feel quite right for the wall boards on the main floor to also be stained dark. So we stained those with a semiopaque white.

You still see all the knots. All the finishes are translucent, with the exception of a door, which is red lacquer. But we wound up with something that began to feel much more elegant than a cozy cabin in the woods.

Katachi Kitchen

I’ve been designing cabinets for high-end kitchen manufacturers for over 30 years, and had been thinking about a Japanese-inspired series. I found my way to Dutch Made in Graybill, Indiana. The CEO and I hit it off right away. I pitched what became the Katachi series to him, and he loved it.

Because I was conceiving Katachi at the same time as I was developing the house, they felt like they went together. It was a perfect scenario. Although the cabinetry is very much Japanese-inspired, if you strip away the koshi wooden screens, it can resemble Arts and Crafts, transitional, or almost even traditional.

Here, we wanted to pull out all the stops with all these different colors. Normally, I wouldn’t do that, but because this was going to be part of the Katachi launch, we wanted to show how flexible and how versatile the series was. How to do that in a small room without it looking like a patchwork quilt was a challenge.

Because of the dominance of these repeating vertical lines at different rhythms and repetitions, it became fairly easy for it to look unified and simple, yet rich and complex. Which really fits right into this whole Japanese idea of surprises and contradictions.

I took the color palette from where we are, in the evergreen woods. The island is rift white oak with a translucent dark-green stain. The cabinetry around the range is maple with a translucent blue stain, which alludes to the beautiful sky in Maine and the ocean just down the road from here. The dark cabinetry is mahogany, a color that’s really dominant in this landscape up here.

For the backsplash tiles, which are from Heath Ceramics, I found a tone resembling the mossy floor of the woods around the house. It feels symphonic.

Family Ties and Fine-Tuning

Technically, it’s a one-bedroom house, but we have these two lofts. My studio has a sofa that pulls out into a queen-size bed, and Ina’s study on the other side has a stack of futons that can be pulled out for a sleeping party.

We can really sleep 10 people comfortably here, and if they need more privacy, Ina and I are happy to give them our bedroom. My twin daughters, who now live in Guadalajara and Philadelphia, love to visit because they kind of grew up in the area over the course of seven summers.

My son, Gabriel Stultz, has been living in Maine for over four years now and has become quite an accomplished tile setter and hardwood floor installer/finisher. He did all of our floors, the backsplashes, and the bathroom.

Because our builder was having a hard time finding subs, Ina and I actually did quite a bit of the work, with friends. We stained the entire exterior of the house, we stained a lot of the interior, and I did quite a bit of the framing.

This also gave me an opportunity to massage the design as we went along.

One of the big questions I had early on was, “How are we going to case the windows and doors?” I finally decided that if we’re doing tongue-and-groove one-by-ten-inch pine, we could just hold that back a quarter of an inch from the inside of the jams and the headers, without any casings. So there’s some modernist, minimalist cues here, but because of the materials, proportions, and finishes, it does not feel at all like a modern, minimalist exercise.

Baling Out

The property had a 450-square-foot, one-room straw bale house that was built in the early 2000s and sat empty for many years. Originally we were going to tear it down. Then I thought, “The building is naturally insulated. It’s pretty sturdy. I wonder if we could move it.”

We found a contractor who is locally famous for doing incredibly challenging moving projects. He picked the straw bale house up and tucked it back into the woods, 75 feet off the road. Right now, we use it for storage, but it’s completely weathertight, and straw bales stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, so we’re thinking it would be a nice little dormitory after our kids have kids and there’s too many people to fit in our main house.

The guy who built it is still around, and he does stonework. We had him do the stone steps around the west gable of the house. He was tickled that this house he built back when he was kind of a hippy-dippy kid in his 20s is still here, and stood up all these years.

Vintage Furniture

We bought very little for the interior because that we both had things we’d collected over many years that really fit into the house’s aesthetic.

Ina inherited from her parents’ estate a Hans Wegner dining table and chairs, and Wegner nesting tables. He father was Danish, and both her parents had really good taste.

I went to school for art first and then industrial design. My senior year, we had a whole quarter studying the great midcentury Danish furniture designers. I had chairs by Arne Jacobsen and lamps from Poul Henningsen. My work table is a circa 1920s refectory table made in Philadelphia. I have a couple of Nessen lamps, and some more obscure things.

It all fit beautifully in here. The only piece that we bought was a vintage Finn Juhl Japan chair and ottoman. The bedroom is small—and that four-post bed, it’s a big piece. But it feels just right in that room. It was made in the early 1800s, and it’s all mahogany.

More Construction Diary stories:

They Lived in a Yurt for Six Years as They DIYed Their $708K Home

A Designer Builds Her First House for $659K—on a Forested Portland Hillside

This Coastal Cabin Renovation Is a Master Class in Craftsmanship

Project Credits:

Designer: Scott A. Stultz & Associates

Builder: Matthew Freedman

Structural Engineer: Groton Timberworks

Civil Engineer: Andrew McCullough Engineering Consultants

Update on 3/26/26: The nearby camp where Scott and his children vacationed is a rustic resort, not a summer camp for kids.

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