The Appeal of the Small Cabin

the desk on the second floor of the Chertecho Tree Tower

The current issue of Texas Architect features a short article I wrote about a project near Fredericksburg, Texas. I always visit the building I’m writing about, but as this was a small vacation cabin operated as an Airbnb, it presented an opportunity to actually stay there overnight. And so I took a break from the chaos of the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and spent a day relaxing at the Chertecho Tree Tower.

It proved to be an incredibly rewarding experience. The design itself was incredibly thoughtful and I discovered several details that would have surely gone unnoticed had my visit been shorter. Sitting at the small desk on the second floor, I was able to write the initial draft of the article that (after several weeks of edits and revisions) focused on the experience of inhabiting this building rather than just describing its formal organization.

While seated at that desk (or was it on the sofa on the floor below it or the deck on the floor above it?) I was able to take a moment to reflect on the work our office had done over the previous months of that year. We found ourselves designing a number of vacation homes that started “small” but had grown in size and complexity as our clients refined and expanded their programmatic needs. Although we were pleased with how these projects developed, there was something undeniably compelling about the scale of cabin I was then occupying. Without all the practical considerations permanent home, a cabin affords its occupants a chance to live differently. Because they are by definition located away from the urban centers where most of us live, they offer a chance to interact with an uncommon place in an uncommon way. Put another way, the architectural potential of a cabin is as rich and as varied as the Texas landscape.

This was something I realized I wanted to develop further, regardless of if a client was going to pay me to do it. And thus the idea for our year-long “Cabins for Texas” project was born.