A Fashion Stylist’s Unplugged Cabin in the Woods
Step Inside His World and You’ll Never Want to Leave…
This perfectly-designed house is the astounding proof of man’s growing fondness to dwell closer to nature as city life becomes faster-paced and less-appealing. Scott Newkirk is a (very talented) fashion stylist, and though he works in the city, his heart can be found in this one room forest lodge, where he vacations for peace of mind (not to mention peace and quiet).
During the week, Scott Newkirk, a fashion stylist and interior designer, leads the usual hectic city life. Some days, he’s working at Coach or on John Varvatos’s spring show; other days, he’s consulting at a client’s Park Avenue apartment or mulling over plans for another house he’s building upstate. Newkirk had been living close to the land on the property already, in a wood-frame tent, but it burned down. Not long after, he came across the 1973 classic eco-architecture book Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art, which celebrated small, handcrafted houses constructed out of recovered and scavenged materials. That got him thinking about building a house on his property with the same innocence and integrity he was reading about. The traditional post-and-beam frame of the house uses old square-head nails on the exterior siding and floor, with a few modern ones for the roof. The smaller side windows are handmade, and the glass-paneled fronts both upstairs and downstairs are standard aluminum frames clad in wood. The downstairs panels slide open, and an upstairs panel pivots. To complete the indoor-outdoor feel, there is a twelve-foot strip of window across the rear with an eye-level view of the backyard. The completed complex (including an outhouse, guest house, and outdoor shower) sits on about three acres of Newkirk’s 50-acre property. “The house reminds me of every fort I built in the woods as a kid growing up in Jackson, Mississippi,” he says.
NEXT UP: THIS COUPLE HAS IT ALL… IN A VERY TINY HOME
