Tom Kundig’s Delta Shelter, finished in 2005 in Mazama, Washington, is a steel box on four steel legs. That sounds blunt until you see where it stands, on a 40-acre meadow beside the Methow River that sits inside a 100-year flood plain. The footprint is about 200 square feet. The river can come and go underneath, and the meadow stays a meadow.
That’s the practical end of designing with the land. Not grand philosophy, just a set of moves, most of them simple, that let a small building sit on a site without bulldozing it into submission. Cabins are the best place to watch these moves at work, because there’s nowhere for a bad decision to hide.
Lift it off the ground
The most useful single trick is to stop treating the ground as something to flatten. A foundation of piers, posts or stilts touches the earth at a few points instead of along a full slab. Water drains where it always did. Roots survive. On a slope, you skip the excavation altogether.
Kundig did it twice in the same valley. A couple of years after Delta Shelter, his firm built the Rolling Huts nearby, six small cabins on a flood plain meadow that had been a campground. Each one sits on a steel and wood platform on wheels. The huts aren’t really meant to roll around. The wheels lift them clear of the ground so the native grasses can grow back underneath and around them, and the herd of six keeps each one’s mountain view open. Each is about 200 square feet inside, with a slightly larger covered deck. Wheels on a house that never moves. We love that!
On Fogo Island, off Newfoundland, Todd Saunders set part of the Fogo Island Inn, finished in 2013, on corten steel stilts about 30 feet high. A conventional foundation wasn’t practical on the island’s rock, and building on stilts was already the local habit. Before the inn went up, four small artist studios were built around the island, which may be the better lesson. Start small and see what the place will take.
We’ve written about a gentler version in Norway, where Espen Surnevik raised a pair of treetop cabins on slender stilts so the forest floor is left alone.
Face the sun, then shade it
The second move costs nothing at all, which is why it’s skipped so often. Turn the building. Passive solar design says to stretch a house along an east-west axis and put most of its glass on the side facing the equator (south, for us in the Northern Hemisphere). Then size the roof overhang so it blocks the high summer sun and lets the low winter sun reach deep inside. A stone or concrete floor in that sunlight soaks up heat by day and gives it back at night.
The site does half of it for you if you let it. Deciduous trees on the sunny side shade the house in summer and drop their leaves just as you want the light. Keep the big west-facing windows small, since late afternoon sun is what cooks a cabin in August. None of this is new. It’s what builders did everywhere before cheap heating made it optional.
Let it weather
Kundig’s huts are clad in steel, plywood and car decking, with the interiors left raw. That points at the third move, which is choosing materials that age toward the site instead of away from it. Unpainted timber silvers. Weathering steel rusts to a stable brown. A dark roof and dark walls recede into a tree line, where a white box would announce itself from a mile off. The cabins in the photos here are a good example: black timber, a dark metal roof, and grass allowed to grow right up to the walls instead of a ring of lawn and gravel.
Paving is the quiet culprit. Every driveway and patio sheds water that the ground used to absorb. A path of stepping stones through grass, like the one above, lets rain do what it always did.
The edges
None of this is free. Stilts and piers need careful engineering, and on soft ground they can cost more than a slab. Wheels and steel shutters suit an architect with Kundig’s budget better than most owner-builders. And a small cabin that touches the ground lightly can still do real harm if it’s reached by a new road cut through a forest. The lightest move is often the access, not the building.
But the order of operations holds at any budget. Walk the land in different seasons. Find where water runs and where the wind comes from. Put the building where it does least damage, lift it if you can, face it to the sun, and stop clearing when you’ve cleared enough.
For more cabins that sit easily in wild places, our collection of beautifully remote cabins is the next stop. And if you’d rather the house all but vanish, there’s the mirrored home that disappears into its forest.
