Located in Door County, Wisconsin, this 1,855 sq ft private house was designed by Johnsen Schmaling Architects.

Description by Johnsen Schmaling Architects
This small house for a graphic designer and her husband sits on the heavily wooded eastern shore of Wisconsin?s Door County, a narrow peninsula on Lake Michigan. Embedded in a dense forest of deciduous and coniferous trees, the building?s unassuming volume is quietly nestled in a small clearing at the western edge of the gently sloping site, its low-slung silhouette virtually disappearing in the surrounding vegetation.
The building?s restrained exterior material palette is limited to charred cedar siding from Northern Wisconsin, its textured, somber blackness complemented by varnished clear cedar, dark-anodized aluminum, and glass. Echoing the visual depth and surface oscillations of bark covering the trunks of trees, the charred wood boards were installed over furring strips of varying depths to form a gently folding, undulating building skin, not unlike a pleated curtain ? a meandering and highly faceted veil that wraps the house and replaces what could have been a conventional, sharply defined perimeter with a more ambiguous boundary, one that softens the building?s rigorous geometry and moderates the transition from artificial construct to natural context. A narrow gravel road leads to a small, trellised forecourt carved deep into the home?s rectangular building mass, a tapered space whose forced pers...