The House In The Woods – Nature Integrated Contemporary Design

by Paul Ciocoiu · March 4, 2016

There’s probably nothing equally fascinating as a house built in the middle of a forest. Not any sort of house, but one raised in a contemporary style which we would rather imagine in an exclusivist neighborhood of a large city and not lost in the wilderness. This is probably what the owners counted on when asking an architecture firm to build a modern structure far from the city craze. What came out can be seen in the images below, a home perfectly integrated into the surrounding natural environment on the shores of Lake Michigan.

The building’s restrained exterior material palette is limited to charred cedar siding from Northern Wisconsin, its textured, somber blackness complemented by varnished clear cedar, dark-anodized aluminum, and glass. Echoing the visual depth and surface oscillations of bark covering the trunks of trees, the charred wood boards were installed over furring strips of varying depths to form a gently folding, undulating building skin, not unlike a pleated curtain – a meandering and highly faceted veil that wraps the house, architects describe on their website.

The house in the woods – right at the heart of nature

A narrow gravel road leads to a small, trellised forecourt carved deep into the home’s rectangular building mass, a tapered space whose forced perspective converges at the glazed vestibule and continues into a recessed covered outdoor room on the opposite side. A continuous wall of milled lumber, stacked at slight angles and finished with a lustrous varnish to create a highly tactile surface of folding ribbons, extends from the forecourt into the house and visually anchors the entry sequence. Inside, the vestibule connects to an open living space with an oversized sliding glass door system that provides access to a linear patio, its paved plane slightly sunken into the existing topography and contained by a long, illuminated concrete bench running parallel to the house, they further detailed.

The house in the woods – exterior details

Across from the large sliding doors, a delicate sculptural steel staircase, supported by a filigree of vertical rods, anchors the living space and leads to the upper bedroom suite and the expansive vegetated roof covering the main building volume. Contrasting the building’s dark exterior shell, the interior material palette is dominated by white walls, white lacquered cabinets, and a grey polished concrete floor, all forming a deliberately neutral, serene backdrop against which the ever-changing tableau of the foliage outside can unfold.