Be careful eating any wild mushrooms you find growing in the woods around this spooky looking house. Rotterdam architects 24H (now split into Natrufied and EARTHbound) created many flowing, nonlinear designs for buildings throughout Europe, but those were generally much larger structures than we cover here. This one, perched above a creek near Lake Övre Gla in the Glaskogen Nature Reserve in Sweden, comes in at around 200 square feet, so it’s a perfect fit for these pages (and for the reserve’s rather baroque building regulations).
24H didn’t build the curvy cabin from the ground up – they remodeled it from a late-19th-century structure which we’re willing to bet didn’t look anything like this. Again thanks to the building rules that was the only way to go, as new construction isn’t allowed near the lake. To maximize space while keeping the cabin within the reserve’s size limit, 24H built an ingenious wheeled room that slides out of the main structure to make an enclosed porch area.
They wanted it to fit seamlessly into both its surroundings and local history and culture. To that end they used red cedar siding that will gradually fade to the grey of the area’s rock formations, traditional stickor roofing, and an elevated style with origins among the indigenous Sámi (or Lapps). The use of reindeer hide to cover the walls of the sliding room is also a Sámi tradition – not to mention a very effective insulation.
The cabin is entirely off-grid, and hasn’t even got an indoor bathroom (there’s an outhouse a short distance away). There is a propane stove for cooking, and solar-powered lighting takes advantage of Sweden’s long hours of summer daylight. There’s also one luxury item you won’t find in most backwoods cabins: a stream-fed hot tub warmed by an underground woodstove.