Cabin fever - innovative cabin designs

Sunset, March, 1999 by Daniel Gregory, Peter O. Whiteley

Compact, innovative designs from across the West will spark plans for your weekend home; a primer on purchasing country property helps you get started

* You are stuck in traffic, sitting through yet another long meeting, or simply navigating the daily flood tide of phone calls, faxes, and e-mails. Suddenly your mind conjures up the cabin you have always wanted to buy or build. What does it look like? Is it a tower in the woods? A barn in a field? A one-room log house by lake or stream? On the following pages you'll find all of these and more, each a small-scale delight, taking advantage of its particular site and reveling in the pleasures of the Western landscape. Cost information accompanies each cabin, along with advice on finding suitable building sites.

Pioneer-style

Bill Phelps manages a log-home building company in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, south of Missoula, so when he decided to build a cabin, it had to be made of logs. He used 9-inch-thick lodgepole pine (harvested from forest-fire kill and stained to protect against discoloration) and synthetic chinking. The structure is a tiny icon of shelter, just one 14- by 20-foot room, with a 12-foot-deep front porch under a simple gable covered in green roll roofing. Inside are the bare necessities, including a woodstove, sink, under-counter refrigerator, hot plate, table, sofa bed, and small bathroom. You can see almost everything from the front porch.

Sited near a pond at some distance from the Phelpses' home, the little house is used primarily for guests. With the gabled porch's taut triangular outline overlooking the water, the house has a vivid presence, like a diminutive ark ready to set sail. "It has none of the usual house noises," says Phelps. "There's no furnace, no pump; you just hear the water going over the pond's spillway, and occasionally horses clopping across the bridge. My wife, Nondi, comes over here to escape Will - our 14-year-old son - and me now and then." Though it's close to civilization, it's everything a getaway cabin should be: a restorative place apart.

DESIGN: Bill Phelps, Custom Log Homes, Stevensville, MT (406/777-5202)

COST: About $150 per square foot

Kit-built: A case study

Peg Snyder and Michael Mortenson's 1,100-square-foot vacation cabin rises from the center of a 10-acre field on the west side of Washington's Whidbey Island. Although it looks like an old barn converted to a living space, it was actually built from a kit that arrived on a flatbed truck in 1993. All that was needed to complete the shell was the windows; they were ordered or salvaged from local sources. Five years and two children later, the simple, handsome cabin stands as a testimony to perseverance, sweat equity, and helpful friends and relatives.

"We wanted a house that was historical- and rural-looking, reasonably priced, and easy to build," says Mortenson, who had some building experience from remodeling his permanent home. After extensive research, he found a New Hampshire company that offered a 24- by 32-foot, barn-shaped structure that met their requirements. The kit, excluding windows and doors, was $15,930. (Today the same kit runs $19,340.)

The post-and-beam framing system allowed some freedom in locating windows, doors, and interior walls, and even in determining the size of the upstairs loft. Having developed a plan that suited their needs, Snyder and Mortenson worked with the manufacturer so that all the framing pieces were precut to size. "The only thing I had to cut was the exterior siding," Mortenson recalls.

Construction started in a hurry, and the shell of the house was completed after a few weeks of steady work. Then things slowed down as weekend visits became infrequent. "We used the place like a big tent: we just camped out there." Finally, Mortenson built the kitchen cabinets, trucked them to the island, and the house was finished.

The main floor contains a combination living/dining/kitchen area, a small bedroom, and a bathroom. The living room and part of the kitchen rise to the ridgeline; a sleeping loft for the kids covers the rest of the space. French doors open the living room to a 16- by 24-foot deck and expansive views toward the distant Olympic Mountains.

Interior finishes are simple and colorful. Painted surfaces - the plywood floor, walls, and cabinets - animate the rooms and complement the exposed wood posts and beams. A freestanding woodstove, rated to heat a 1,000-square-foot house, sits on an elevated, tiled hearth, forming a focal point for the living room.

The low cost and inviting results are seductive, but Mortenson offers this advice: "Keep an open mind. You have to be mentally prepared for the dust, the mess, and effort." He also praises the well-organized kit he used. "Even though we did take five years to complete the house, it really didn't take a lot of time or skill."

DESIGN: Barn-House by Shelter-Kit, Tilton, NH (603/286-7611)

WOODSTOVE: Intrepid II by Vermont Castings (800/227-8683)

Once and future bungalow

The outside's on the inside of this contemporary 1,900-square-foot vacation bungalow. Architect David Johnson designed it to replace a smaller cabin on a densely wooded site. Salvaging the old cabin's redwood siding, he resurfaced it and used it like wainscoting inside the house. He combined it with rough-sawn cedar plywood and cedar 1-by-4s to create a distinctive board-and-batten effect. In the living room, the old siding rises to about 8 feet; broad plywood panels extend the rest of the way to the open, pitched ceiling. Similar paneling effects are achieved in the bedrooms and the baths. The result is a home that feels modern and traditional at the same time.