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The house itself is about 520 square feet, and there’s a separate sauna building with a guest bedroom, which is under 200 square feet. "I kept the buildings really small to keep costs down,

A view from the kitchen out toward the living area provides a sense of the lofted interior.

A floor lamp nearly eight feet tall anchors the seating area in the living area. Ceilings that are 12 feet tall at the highest point help the room feel expansive. “We needed to find a way to define different areas in a relatively tight space,” Lachapelle says. It’s the clients’ first experience with an open floor plan. “We raised our kids in an old Victorian, and the farmhouse we live in now is chopped up into tiny rooms save for the studio we just added,” the husband says.

In the living room, the team raised the firebox, cladded the hearth in a tactile plaster finish, and installed a floating limestone bench that wraps the column. On the left (unseen) is integrated firewood storage, and a cozy reading nook sits on the right. "The bench was designed to be used as a social space/lounge, and is well-used," says Coffey. The wood beams and red brick were scraped and stripped many times to remove the silver paint and reclaim a natural state.

Classic midcentury features like the wall of glass and clerestory windows provide the home with a connection to the outdoors and flood the living space with natural light. A rough stone-inlay fireplace connects the living room with the facade.

A dry-stacked rock hearth supports a Charnwood freestanding woodstove, which was carefully chosen to fit the scale of the surroundings.

The total cost of the build, including all appliances, plumbing fixtures, and lighting, as well as the milling of trees that were cleared, came to $514,500.

Wood burning stove on concrete plinth in living room

View of Living Room

The Stovax freestanding wood fire in the living room is used to heat the home. The concrete floor provides thermal mass, which helps maintain thermal stability.

A cozy Bodart & Gonay tunnel stove heats the main living area. A black-and-white String pendant light by Flos adds contrast to the wood-clad room.

A playful mixture of antiques and mid-century furnishings adds personality to the white-box interior of a cottage.

The walls behind the fireplace are 400-millimeter-thick rammed earth, and they were formed on site by a specialist contractor. The material not only provides thermal mass to protect the interior from the heavy heat load experienced in summer, but also heats up when the fireplace is in use in winter months to provide gentle heat release to the main living area.

The living room’s wood-burning fireplace has a concrete hearth that wraps the chimney and runs under the windows, acting as seating, a plant ledge, and creating a spot to store logs, all of which are harvested from the site.