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All Photos/exterior/siding material : wood/building type : small home

Exterior Wood Siding Material Small Home Design Photos and Ideas

After renting in San Francisco for a decade, DIY couple Molly Fiffer and Jeff Waldman bought 10 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the pair and their friends built a cabin compound complete with sheds, tree decks, a pavilion, a wood-fired hot tub, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower. The cabin is made from locally sourced, rough-sawn redwood, which the couple stained with nontoxic Eco Wood Treatment to give the panels an aged appearance and a dark patina.
After staying in a tree house listed on Airbnb, Remo Kommnick and Emi Moore wanted their own getaway in the woods. "It was amazing being up in the trees,
A family chose MyCabin to construct prefab structures in their home country of Latvia. The prefab structures have space for work, sleep, and relaxation.
The accessory dwelling unit behind the home of Sonja Batalden in Saint Paul, Minnesota, has cheery yellow siding that the entrance appears to carve into. “If the yellow of the siding is the wrapper on the candy, this is kind of like the gooey middle,” architect Christopher Strom says about the thermally modified ash lining the entry.
The overall home is constructed with larch timber, a British wood, and features a central ridge beam that gives it a butterfly-shaped roof. Shou sugi ban was done on the wood to give it a charred finish.
The buildings on the property sit close together, with carefully considered landscaping connecting them into a cozy compound. The main house's deck, which sits about 15 feet above the ground, sits on structural fins. Thin stainless steel railings almost disappear against the forest views.
Using a contemporary play on vintage ski cabins in Vermont, architect David R. Maclean designed a modern home that takes advantage of sweeping valley views and opens up to the surrounding forested landscape.
When the trees leaf out, the overhauled guest cabin, the couple’s “Scandinavian dream cabin in the woods,” is hidden from view from the main house, making for a private retreat.
Laura and Juris chose Manta North's Slope model, which differs from its Ray model just in the roof shape. The metal roof can be built to incorporate solar panels.
One of the selling points of the cottage was the meadow surrounding it, which the windows in the addition seek to capture.
The home’s 2,340 square feet span the upper and lower levels, while the basement can serve as an independent ADU, home office, or guest quarters. The lower-level entry is now more comfortable, with a wide waiting area protected from the weather overhead.
Michael Benjamin Lerner of the band Telekinesis collaborated with local prefab builder NODE to build a 392-square-foot DADU in Lerner’s Seattle backyard. The builder took care of design, permitting, site prep, and the foundation and framing. Michael tackled the finish work.
The ADU stands ready for guests—and the owners to use as a temporary home during renovations of the main house.
Reclaimed wood graces the exterior and wraparound deck of the ADU, which is surrounded by native landscaping.
The Bracy Cottage — Front Facade
The Bracy Cottage — Front Facade
A view of the opposite side shows the main entrance off of the garden and the LaCantina Swing Doors in the kitchen. The couple’s 1980s sailboat is moored along a separate dock to the right.

Photo by Kevin Scott
LaCantina’s Zero Post Corner Sliding Glass Doors seamlessly open a corner of the home. “The large openings make it easier for us to live in a smaller footprint and use the deck as a functional living space,” Suzanne adds. “In that way, the outdoors feel very much part of the interior. It's wonderful.”

Photo by Kevin Scott
Front Exterior
The 1,120-square-foot structure is compact enough that it doesn’t encroach on the kids’ play area.
"For most of us, this is the first home we’ve owned and the first house we built ourselves. These are all floating homes, with specific requirements for materials. It wasn’t easy,” explains resident Wouter Valkenier.
“For me, sustainability is a social aspect of the neighborhood. It was a huge investment of time, but together we helped each other through all the technical innovations. None of us could have done this on our own,
Of the 30 houses, 15 are inhabited by more than one household. One home has three floors, the lowest of which is underwater, with daylight entering through the small rectangular windows above the waterline.
The residents decided to build with a limited set of sustainable materials; for the facades, that meant wood, bamboo, or cork.
Residents of Schoonschip, a floating neighborhood in Amsterdam, designed their own houses, working with various architects and contractors. The water in the formerly industrial canal is now clean enough to swim in, but the opposite shore is still a landscape of warehouses.
The Nook exterior features shiplap cypress siding, a reclaimed oak deck, and an entranceway of oak blackened in the traditional Japanese method.
The micro home in Warsaw that architect Adam Pszczolkowski designed for his family and friends features expansive windows framed by plywood and white-painted HPL panels. "I chose white because of its modern and timeless character," the architect says.
Esperance Chalet Village is located in the southwestern coastal town of Esperance, Australia. The compound features a mix of A-frames and other structures updated by <span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">Fiona and Matt Shillington, who purchased the property after moving to the area from Sydney five years ago.</span><span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;"> </span>
“Without opening an umbrella, we can relax using the exterior long wood bench that’s shaded by the roof’s overhang,” Adam says.
“The main and side entrance doors were handmade using the same plywood we used for the interior walls,” Adam says.
The micro home in Warsaw that architect Adam Pszczolkowski designed for his family and friends features expansive windows framed by plywood and white-painted HPL panels. “I chose white because of its modern and timeless character,” the architect says.
The cabin and back deck are cantilevered over a slope in the property.
The ground floor is split between Gloria’s bedroom and the kitchen and living area, with a bathroom at the center.
Gloria Montalvo’s weekend getaway on a reserve in central Chile is just 580 square feet, but the entire forest is its living room. Designed by architect Guillermo Acuña, it features a transparent facade over a skeletal pine frame.
With his mother moving from Massachusetts to California to be closer to family, architect Peter Liang created a 265-square-foot tiny home, dubbed the Kleines Haus, behind his sister’s residence in Oakland for the matriarch to land in. “Since we are a mixed family, it’s key that my kids are close to their grandparents,” says homeowner Stefanie Liang Chung. “Now their German grandmother is teaching them, and I’m grateful that I have an Asian partner who knows that you take in your in-laws.”
With a new baby on the way and the soon-to-be grandmother moving in, Seattleites Ilga Paskovskis and Kyle Parmentier asked Best Practice Architecture to expand their detached garage into a 570-square-foot ADU, which they now call the Granny Pad. “We can see the joy it brings Grandma when the baby comes over to visit,” says Kyle. “It’s the best part of her day.”
The Dome House is the perfect place to achieve that socially distanced vacation. The circular structure sits isolated amongst the surrounding mountains and windmills. Throughout the home, large-scale windows boast uninterrupted, 360-degree views of the environment. If desired, in-home massages can be booked, or you can find further relaxation in the outdoor jacuzzi.
Pictured is a rendering of a 570-square-foot 2X lightHouse with a one-bedroom unit stacked atop a two-car garage.
"Radical sustainability
Constructed with sustainably sourced lumber and large, double-pane windows, Studio Shed’s all-season Signature Series units are popularly used as backyard offices.
Smart storage tactics are combined with a U-shaped sofa to maximize space in this delightful tiny home.
After: The barn’s original framing was kept for its agricultural character. Faulkner Architects applied an exterior envelope of salvaged redwood and added a Cor-Ten steel roof that will patina over time.
Black-framed windows and doors tie in with the black metal roof and dark chimney.
The tongue-and-groove wood boards are divided at the half-height by a contrasting, black steel plate.
A simple material palette of wood, steel, and glass clads the exterior of each house.
The simple structures are a modern play on the traditional cabin with wood-clad exteriors and gabled roofs.
Nestled within Verholy Relax Park in Sosnivka, Ukraine, these contemporary guest cottages by YOD Design Lab offer a sense of solitude and a meaningful outdoor connection. Highly reflective windows mirror the forest, while an outdoor terrace wraps around each cottage. Inside, interiors are swathed in organic hues and materials to allow the views to be the focal point—each dwelling is arranged so that windows peer at pines rather than another building. The houses are even installed on geo-screens to save the root systems of the surrounding trees in the forest, to prevent them from being cut down.
The narrow strips of alder that encase the exterior mimic the textured bark of the surrounding pine trees.
A Thermowood deck is enclosed with hot-rolled metal railings.
Spurred by the city’s generous ADU incentives and a desire to reduce their environmental footprint, a couple—he an architect and she a construction engineer—designed and built an elegant, 624-square-foot backyard home with sustainability at its core. Scott Mooney and Lauren Shumaker’s compact backyard home is located in the back half of their 5,000-square-foot lot in the Richmond neighborhood of Southeast Portland. The couple plans to track the energy use of their new-build’s electric equipment and appliances. The data will inform the size of their photovoltaic array they'll add to offset the energy costs of the ADU and the bungalow.
Faulkner likes how the new building acts to "fit like a glove over the top" of the old one, so the memory of what was there is preserved.
The doorway on the left accesses an entry porch, which can be closed with the sliding door. The screened porch is the stepped-down volume on the right.
The 56-foot home spent three years being used as a trade show prototype by HMK Prefab Homes. The current owners purchased it at the 2014 Dwell on Design conference in Los Angeles.
The hot pink bungalow peeks out from behind lush tropical landscaping.
“We’d go to the salvage yard every weekend and painstakingly go through hundreds of windows, see one that might work, write down the measurements, run out to Jeff’s truck, and put it in the SketchUp model,” says Molly. The chair is by Christophe Pillet for Emu.
"The building form was intentionally asymmetric and clad in hand-stained, split-face shakes and metal," says Campos Studio.
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