Thirty-five acres in Gilpin County, north of Nederland, on land no road has touched in decades. The clients bought it for the solitude and the forest — Colorado spruce that hasn't seen development. The brief was simple: a small cabin. Four hundred to eight hundred square feet. Something livable for a few months a year. Something that would disappear into the forest rather than dominate it.
What made this project interesting wasn't the square footage. It was the constraints that came with the site. At 9,400 feet, you're above typical residential building practice. Snow load is significant — the roof is designed for 120 pounds per square foot. No municipal water, which meant a spring box system and gravity-fed storage. No utility lines, which meant a hybrid power system and propane backup. And the forest itself: you're building among hundred-year-old spruce and aspen. Every tree saved is a tree the structure works around.
The design came from the site, not from an abstract idea. We spent three days on the land in different weather. Watched how water moved. Identified which trees could stay. Noted where sun hit at different times of year. The cabin's orientation, size, and materials emerged from those observations.
The Structure
Seven hundred and twenty square feet. One large room for living/kitchen, a separate bedroom, a bathroom, and a mudroom entrance. The living space is designed for flexibility — the kitchenette is compact, but the living area is open and can accommodate different furniture arrangements depending on season and use.
Structurally, the building is post-and-beam with steel connections, not typical stick-frame. This allows for larger open spans and takes advantage of reclaimed Douglas fir beams that became available from a barn deconstruction project ninety miles south. The long spans mean fewer interior walls, which keeps the space feeling larger and lets light move through the building in a single gesture.
The foundation is a concrete stem wall on piers driven to undisturbed soil — we needed to get below the frost line at that elevation, which is about four feet. The piers are spaced ten feet apart and tied together with steel moment connections. This prevents the frost-heave issues that plague mountain structures built on shallow foundations.
Materials
The exterior is copper standing seam roofing with a 8:12 pitch — steep enough to shed snow, low enough to not dominate the composition. Reclaimed Douglas fir for the visible structure, both inside and out. The walls are oriented strand board sheathing with a vapor-open rain-screen detail — critical at this elevation where humidity and temperature swings are extreme. The interior is plaster over rigid insulation, which gives better performance than traditional stud walls and keeps the post-and-beam structure exposed for the entire living experience.
Finishes are intentionally austere. Concrete floors, finished with a natural sealer. Plaster walls. Simple mechanical systems. The beauty is in the materials and the light, not in applied decoration.
Systems
Water comes from a spring box two hundred vertical feet upslope. Gravity feed to a 2,000-gallon storage cistern behind the cabin. From there, the potable supply is distributed to the cabin. Wastewater goes through a simple septic system on the downslope side, placed where the soil composition allows for proper leaching.
Power is a hybrid system: twenty-four solar panels on a ground-mounted rack (the roof's steep pitch and northern exposure made roof-mounting inefficient), six kilowatt-hours of battery storage, and a backup propane generator. This gives the clients consistent power for lighting, refrigeration, and basic heating, with the generator available for heating during heavy cloud periods in winter.
Heating is radiant floor with propane backup. The radiant system heats from the concrete floor using a simple boiler that can run on propane or, when solar is adequate, from excess battery charge.
The Site Work
We cleared a minimal footprint — about 1,200 square feet including the building and immediate area. Every tree that could stay stayed. The parking area is 150 yards down a gravel track from the cabin itself, which means the cabin feels genuinely remote even though it's only five minutes walking from the car. The trail in follows existing elk paths through the forest.
A small deck on the south side is the primary outdoor living space. It's elevated enough to clear potential snow accumulation but low enough that it doesn't feel exposed.
What Worked, What We'd Change
The post-and-beam structure with reclaimed timber was the right choice. It's durable, performs well, and has visual character that feels appropriate to the site and the program. The copper roofing, while expensive upfront, will outlast the building. The radiant floor heating is efficient and comfortable.
If we were doing this again, we might push the bedside fenestration further back into the wall — at this elevation, direct solar gain on windows at night actually increases heating load during cold months when the sun angle is low. But the clients wanted views, and views they have. It's a reasonable trade.
The cabin opened in late February 2026. The clients spent their first months there in early spring, watching the snow recede and the forest wake up around them. They said afterward that the building does what they wanted: it disappears into the landscape. You're not aware you're in a structure. You're aware you're in the forest, and the cabin is just a shelter within that larger experience.
That's when you know the design-build worked — when the building becomes transparent to the place, and the site becomes more vivid because of what you've built.