The simple and linear form of this remote vacation home juts out from a cliff over a sea-lion reserve in Chile; crafted to look aged and monolithic, it appears almost like a modern ruin in the natural landscape.

Designed by architects Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, based in nearby Concepción, the Loba House juts out off the Coliumo Peninsula. For the clients, it is a dream getaway, but it takes a particular personality to enjoy the rugged forms and structural simplicity of this quiet place.

The heavy concrete structure is predominantly made of concrete, its roof forming a terrace overlooking the ocean below (with a stepped chimney sticking up from it).

“In its under-dimensioned thickness, in its narrow and tall proportion, the building could be read as an inhabited wall that runs perpendicular to the natural topography.”

The interior is intentionally sparse and rough, seeming almost like something constructed out of mud brick by hand, or an ancient retreat for some monastic order. The floors step up the hill, following the topography.

The place is just 750 square feet. Kitchen and bathroom fixtures as well as the hearth are built into the concrete columns, as is storage space below various platform levels. Below are common spaces — above: sleeping quarters.

Skylights illuminate various rooms and the board-formed walls, while limited windows keep down costs while framing specific views of the surroundings. Simplicity and geometry dominate the design inside and out, which are also common themes in the architects’ other projects (their own home is a simple concrete tower).

A cabin is defined both by a remote location and a certain rusticity, whether it’s a wilderness hut for hikers or a family retreat, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a basic wooden shack. Modern cabin design shakes up this typology depending on the setting and the user’s needs – it could be a geometric prefab on stilts, a glass-fronted structure hovering over a lake, a series of small off-grid buildings that come together into a cohesive whole, or a totally transparent glass room providing stunning views of its island surroundings.

Kudhva: Cabins Made by a Former Boat Builder

Kudhva is the Cornish term for hideout, appropriately used here as the name for a series of experimental modern cabins by New British Design. Set in a disused slate quarry, the pyramidal cabins were constructed by a boat builder turned furniture maker, primarily using slats of larch wood and pine panels. The cabins are prefabricated offsite. “For as long as I can remember, the fascination an elevated aspect has drawn me to certain objects from diving boards to the umpire’s chair,” says Ben Huggins, founder of New British Design. “The familiar unfamiliarity of seeing an everyday scene or object from a strange position is the genesis of making it interesting again.”

Starfish-Shaped Seastar Trekking Cabin by Prescription

The Seastar trekking cabin by Prescription, set on a Baltic beach, takes its shape from both starfish and the pentagon star icon used on map apps to save locations. Designed to accommodate four hikers at a time, the off-grid cabin offers minimal amenities including showers using collected rainwater. One of the five points contains the woodstove, while the other four offer sleeping nooks for hikers in sleeping bags.

Sunset Cabin by Taylor Smyth Architects

This simple one-room sleeping cabin on the shore of Lake Simcoe by Taylor Smyth Architects combines the rusticity of a hiker’s shelter with the aesthetics of modern homes with the use of a graphic wooden screen. Its inner volume is made of glass, sheltered on there sides by cedar slats and covered with a green roof.

Cabin Laksvatn by Hamran/Johansen Arkitekter

Designed to accommodate large families with a total of 9 beds, Cabin Laksvatn by Hamran/Johansen Arkitekter looks out onto the alpine landscape of Northern Norway. With a footprint of just 150 square feet, the cabin fits all of its common areas onto the bottom level and manages to fit all those beds into nooks beneath the gabled roof.

72h Cabin by JeanArch

The 72h Cabin by JeanArch has been built in multiples and installed on the shores of a private island, some fully enclosed by wooden walls, others completely transparent to take in the surrounding woods and water. Each structure is made of Norway spruce, the same kind of trees that surround it. The cabin is named for the number of hours needed to spend in nature to drastically reduce stress, as found in a study by Karolinska Institute.

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The Modern Cabin 14 Compact Rural Homes Go Beyond The Rustic

Trees seem to temporarily allow humans to form them into a new shape and give them a different purpose before reclaiming their wild nature and going on with their tree-business in these wild wood designs. Taking a modern approach to branch-based furniture, decor and sculpture, they celebrate the natural qualities of the materials, allowing them to shine in a way that makes them feel truly alive.

Spaghetti Benches by Pablo Reinoso

The slats of a wooden bench just keep growing as if they’re still alive, tangling together and climbing up walls, in Pablo Reinoso’s ‘Spaghetti Bench’ series. It’s almost like the tree the wood came from allowed itself to serve a purpose as seating only temporarily, and then decided to go about its life. The artist extends the same technique to other objects, like picture frames.

Fusion Frames by Darryl Cox

These hybrid frames by Oregon-based artist Darryl Cox start out as two separate objects – the reclaimed roots of manzanita, aspen and juniper trees, and a carefully matched picture frame. The artist carefully matches the tone and texture of the two objects and painstakingly blends them together with carving tools and paint. Look closely and you’ll find that the seams are virtually undetectable.

Sprouting Furniture by Pontus Willfors

The temporarily tamed wood that’s been crafted into chairs and other functional items starts to rebel before you can even sit down in this series by artist Pontus Willfors. It’s almost as if the trees have decided they have no patience for human attempts to turn them into something unnatural.

Fallen Tree Bench by Benjamin Graindorge

This bench by Benjamin Graindorge can’t hide its origins, the smooth surface giving way to stripped branches and then bark. ‘Fallen Tree Bench ‘ is fully supported on one side by a tangle of branches as if we caught it in mid-morph.

Driftwood Coffee Table & Side Table by Bernardo Urbina

Designer Bernardo Urbina blends unexpected upcycled materials together into minimalist tables and other objects. For these two tables, he chose wrap Traviesa and Tugas wood around a black folded metal base.

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Wild Wood 28 Temporarily Tamed Tree Based Designs Branch Out

Load up a prefab cabin on a truck and drop it virtually anywhere you want to be. Rustic lodgings in remote locations aren’t what they used to be now that modern mobile housing is available in so many forms and price ranges, from tiny houses on wheels costing just $11,000 to ultra-narrow habitable garden sheds to cabins shaped like actual logs to take the typology to its extreme.

Escape Vista

The Escape Vista is a 160-square-foot, cedar and cortex steel cabin on wheels that can be towed to the location of your choice to take advantage of its many large windows offering views of your surroundings. There’s room for one or two, and despite its small size, you’ll have a bed, kitchen, dining or work table, lounge area and bathroom. The open interior is finished with aspen wood, and luxury features include solid butcher block tops, designer faucets, integrated solar power, a washer/dryer combo and a pop-up flatscreen television. It starts at $39,900.

Pircher Oberland

Hangar Design Group created this prefabricated, mobile metal-clad cabin for Picher Overland to blend into rocky mountain environments. Vertical wooden siding on either end mimics tree trunks, and the interior is lined in natural wood flooring and synthetic stone-toned tiles.

Flake House by Olgga Architects

This nomadic dwelling by Olgga Architects is like a modern take on the log cabin, camouflaged on the outside by fully-round timber siding. It stands on the site of Frossay in France, open to anybody who needs a simple shelter overnight. The proposal is “based on the concept of the ‘foil’, where the wooden structure is broken in two halves establishing a radical spatial boundary while materializing an unexpected entry sequence. an object, recalling a broken branch, whose unconventional scale is the main idea of the project: to be built-up, taken down, moved, pt down, left behind or taken along, inhabited or left to its surrounding.”

The Wedge: Luxury Rolling Cabin

This 400-square-foot luxury turnkey cabin by Wheelhaus features a spacious bedroom with a king-sized bed, standard-sized bathroom, fireplace, large windows, high ceilings and a private deck. Base prices start at $89,500.

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Mobile Cabins Go Off Grid In These 12 Rustic Modern Designs

Set into a landscape of grassy hills and deteriorating stone walls, a rustic 200-year-old wood and stone structure hides a wholly unexpected modern residence. The renovation in Linescio, Switzerland by Buchner Bründler Architekten adapts an existing country home that had fallen into ruin, setting the new concrete shell into a hillside so that it’s partially subterranean. From the outside, a few streamlined concrete elements are the only signs hinting at a modernized interior.

All new elements are made of concrete, including the recessed bathtub, open fireplace, basins and the kitchen counter. The architects wanted to leave as much of the existing fabric of the historical structures as possible, adding minimalist complementary elements that don’t fight the aging textures for attention.

High, folding wood shutters cover the original front windows, which have partially lost their glass, while a new glass door leads out to the garden. The concrete was brought in layer by layer and still bears the marks of the formwork. The existing walls act as an extra layer of insulation, though the home is only meant for use in the summer.

“The plastic, evocative qualities of the exposed concrete intensify the archaic character and the calm atmosphere of this stone house,” say the architects.