Sauna Plus

This small cabin is situated next to a restored Indiana prairie and adjacent to the existing home at Tryon Farm. Rather than extend the residence, the client wanted a separate building that embodied a simpler, more direct relationship with the landscape. The initial brief for a Finnish-style sauna was combined with a small indoor gathering space and a second story sleeping loft at the height of the tree canopy. The building form was chosen to establish a clear relation to the existing home, a flat roof modernist structure with a single, unexpected shed roof at the northwest corner. The cabin repeats and abstracts this shed roof in order to insert a form that is both distinctive and contextual within the existing environment. Both interior and exterior are clad in Larch wood. The exterior surface is charred and preserved in the traditional Japanese Shou Sugi Ban method, while the interior relates to the character of the Finnish sauna, with a continuous treatment of natural wood that unifies surface, wall and built-in furniture.