Inside a Modern Tiny House for $42,800 | Nestron Cube

Built for family and friends as a space for sport and gathering, the Fieldhouse is a simple, functional structure. Like the immersion of nature and recreation in the development of state and national parks of the early 20th century, this family wanted a structure where friends, family, and neighbors could gather, play sport, celebrate and relax in the country. The Fieldhouse feels distant and secluded, located on a mostly undeveloped seven-acre site, surrounded by a meadow of natural grasses, a fruit orchard, wetland ponds and a maintained field for sporting. As long time natives of the Pacific Northwest, the family was keen to convey a specific sense of place and longevity. The architecture responds to those ideas in its simplicity and versatility, and in its construction from durable, local materials. Inspiration was taken from vernacular stone and timber structures built across the country in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The architects and clients channeled their own recollections of summers spent in Seattle’s waterfront parks and their simple elegant structures, often by early 20th century Seattle architect Ellsworth Storey. The 1,664-square-foot structure consists of a covered outdoor patio flanked by two, offset and enclosed spaces housing a sun room and inglenook to the west, and a kitchen, grill and two bathrooms to the east. Designed to accommodate almost any situation, the Fieldhouse can shelter four as comfortably as it can 60, hosting sleepovers, family sports tournaments, reunions and outdoor dining with ease. The structure employs a gradient of enclosure and structural qualities from the immersive intimate inglenook to the ever thinning shed roof structure, gently lifting off above the central patio. The building can be shutdown to weather storms, or opened wide to allow light, air and activity to pass through freely. The structure provides a straight-forward and visibly-constructed language of materials. It progressively lightens from a solid stone base, to thick timber columns, to pairs of rafters and thinner yet pairs of purlins, supporting the single-plane shed roof. The timber is all Douglas fir and cedar harvested and salvaged from the Pacific Northwest. The stone is taken from a quarry on nearby Vancouver Island and the early, factory-style steel casement doors and windows are West Coast built. This timeless assembly of materials and method of construction suggest that this is a building about its surroundings and a stalwart of the region it resides in, functioning as well today as it will in 100 years. Hoedemaker Pfeiffer design team
Steve Hoedemaker, co-founder and partner
Justin Oldenhuis Project team
Hoedemaker Pfeiffer (Architecture)
Hoedemaker Pfeiffer (Interior Design)
Joseph McKinstry Construction Company (Contractor)
Swenson Say Faget (Structural Engineer)
Kenneth Philp Landscape Architects (Landscape Architect) Photography
Andrew Giammarco

When the eventual owners first visited the existing Alan Taniguchi house in Austin’s Westlake Hills, they…

This renovation project originates from the intervention of a pre-existent building located in the western area of Mexico City; reshaping it into a studio-house project, with clear conditions and an eye set into the pre-existing circumstances. Our design solution takes on a residential structure from the 20th century and recycles it into a project that integrates itself with its immediate natural environment, shattering the hegemony of the high walls behind which the neighboring houses hide, in order to establish a dialogue that transcends the physical limitations of the project. The variations in the depths of different planes, offer the environment a living façade, where the interior activities are guessed from the visual filters that concede intimacy to the interior spaces. The interior-exterior duality brakes its context’s routine, offering a canvas of textures where the concrete and granite give away to the mildness of the metal and the lightness of plastic fabrics. To the exterior, the housing peeks out without invading; whilst opening in the interior, subtlety exposing itself, balancing the volumes that are inserted in the site. An interplay of planes occurs inside allowing the versatility of spaces by the movement of long-distance sliding screens and wainscots formed by timber that contrast in warmth and complexity with the sobriety of the stone coatings and apparent concrete of the enclosures. A new stairway, based on steel strips, reactivates the space where the old one stood, which gave an opportunity to re-signify the ambiance of the circulations as an experience of sculptural character. The front yard of the house marks the limits of the construction and together with the water mirrors and vegetation orient the route beneath a suspended long cover. The architectural program revolves around the home in the ground floor, leaving the studio in a privileged condition towards the garden. The living spaces in the first level have terraces and views to the exterior between and through a green façade woven of plastic cables (recovering the Acapulco chair technique) that sieve and melt together the thick vegetation of the existing trees. The terraces and windows allows an optimal ventilation, illumination and contextualization between the outside and inside. In the top level, the project offers a view above itself and the wooden horizon from a roof garden that elevates to a higher plane the user’s introspection, belonging and pertinence of itself.