The Pleasures of a One-Bedroom Cabin in the Mountains of Washington

If you’re a certain kind of architecture buff, it doesn’t get much better than having the award-winning architect Tom Kundig — known for his inventive, industrial-looking structures — build your house. So when Chris Rogers commissioned Mr. Kundig to design his home in 2009, it was a dream come true.

Known as the Hammer House, the 2,200-square-foot weathering-steel structure that Mr. Kundig created for him rose from a sloping site like a tower, offering long views through walls of glass. The interior was a minimalist composition of meticulously crafted steel and concrete.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Rogers loved it.

Five years later, though, he began feeling restless. Mr. Rogers, now 61 and a real estate broker, has a background in land conservation and helped create the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. He also developed a condominium project with Mr. Kundig.

But increasingly, he found himself drawn to nature. He owned a small second home — a 500-square-foot off-the-grid cabin that he built for himself in the nearby San Juan Islands — and when he was there, his house in the city began to feel like an inconvenience. In 2014, he sold it and moved into a condo, with the idea of adopting a hotel-like lifestyle while he was in the city. But that still didn’t feel quite right.

“I thought that would be my life, moving between the city and the country,” he said. “But as I’ve gotten older, I just realized that I’m definitely more attracted to living close to nature, and less interested in living in the urban environment.”

Looking to make his primary home outside the city, he bought a forested lot with a mouse-infested log cabin near Twisp, a town in the mountainous Methow Valley of Washington, paying $175,000 in 2018.

“I bought into a friend group that all has adjoining land,” Mr. Rogers said. His lot is about five and a half acres; he and two friends share an additional five acres that they’ve agreed to keep as meadow.

After camping on the property for a few years, he decided the log cabin was beyond repair. To replace it, he envisioned building something that was almost the antithesis of the Hammer House: a simple one-story cabin that riffed on the local vernacular.

“I wanted it to be small and to be reflective of the historic cabins in the area,” he said. “For sustainability, making it small is the first move one can make before you add any bells and whistles.”

For help designing the new house, he chose the Seattle-based firm Best Practice Architecture, after seeing its projects blending modern and traditional elements. “He wanted something where, it you squint, it looks like just a classic cabin,” said Ian Butcher, the founding partner. “But the more you pay attention to it, you see that it’s a little more refined and elegant.”

The architects designed a low-slung house of 1,094 square feet with a single bedroom. Clad in gray corrugated-metal siding and topped by a standing-seam metal roof, the structure is designed to be resistant to wildfires in summer and to the heavy snowfall in winter, with minimal maintenance.

Inside, the main living area is essentially one big room with a wood stove, a dining space and a semi-enclosed daybed nook that serves as an all-purpose place for hanging out, working and putting up guests.

Mr. Rogers loves to cook, so he and Mr. Butcher lavished attention on the kitchen. Above the counters, most of the room is wrapped in windows. Where the windows terminate at the range, they installed vintage ceramic tile by the designer Roger Capron, which Mr. Rogers bought years before and lugged from one home to another as he looked for a place to use them. Above a compact worktable at the center of the space, they hung a pendant lamp Mr. Rogers had also bought years earlier, a piece by Stan Bitters evoking a pine cone.

To get a little more space for overnight guests, Mr. Rogers asked the architects to design a stand-alone guest suite. They responded with a 248-square-foot enclosure connected to a detached carport, offering extra sleeping and storage space.

After beginning work in the fall of 2021, Laverty Construction completed the project in the summer of 2023, at a cost of about $600 a square foot. There’s still an old barn on the property, but for now it remains untouched; Mr. Rogers dreams of one day turning it into a combination sauna, ski-waxing room and workshop.

Already, he likes life in the Methow Valley so much that he thinks he may stay put this time.

“I can see up close what is happening with the plants in the garden and the birds and animals that frequent them, as well as the changing weather and light over the mountains or across the big meadow,” he said. “It’s probably the best place I’ve ever lived.”

Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.

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