There’s an important truth that just about any designer, craftsperson, or artist will tell you: Simple is not easy. The most pure, most functional, most stripped-down version of a form might look plain and modest when finished, but that clean surface hides months of painstaking design and careful execution. When a pair of homeowners told Phil Kaplan, principal of Kaplan Thompson Architects, that they wanted their new lakeside cabins to be simple, they began a design process that would test the limits of the term. Through exploration, experimentation, and expert craftsmanship, the homeowners and the project team created two shelters that are as subtly extraordinary as they are apparently modest.

The wooded site on the shore of a lake started out as a fishing camp in the 1950s. After it was bought by the father of one of the homeowners in the 1970s, it became a family getaway, with a comfortable summerhouse that could host the current generation and their friends. But in recent years space was getting tight. “We’re an expanding family, and we use the house in large groups. We have a lot of friends and family friends. We were all happy to pile in until we started having kids,” says one of the homeowners. They imagined adding cabins that would each hold a family of guests; the kids could go to sleep while the adults gathered in the main house. “I can’t tell you how often we watch the sunset before we start cooking, so we’re sitting down to the table at 10 or 11 at night, after the kids have theoretically gone to bed,” says the homeowner.

At first, when the couple told Kaplan they were looking for simplicity, he suggested stripped-down structures that put the construction elements on display. The homeowners clarified that they didn’t want the buildings to necessarily be simple but to look simple. “The lightbulb went off,” says the homeowner. “What if we took this to the opposite extreme? Let’s make these things as soft and serene and peaceful as possible.” Kaplan, working with his associate Adam Wallace and junior designer Ben Bailey, ran with the idea. They envisioned how these cabins might have emerged long ago: “What would your ancestors have done? How would they start these cabins?” says Kaplan. “There wouldn’t be much at first, just little sheds. So let’s create four sheds, each with a gable to shed water or snow. What would happen next? They would want to stick around and spend more time there, so they would connect them. We took the two sets and connected each with a bathroom. It’s the most modest connection you could think of.” Continuing the process, they added a deck “for taking your boots off and hanging out” and a screened porch, to get away from the bugs. As would have happened in the past, the trees that had to be cleared provided lumber for the structures (with supplements from local sawmills). And what about nails? “A hundred years ago,” says Kaplan, “either they would have had cut nails or, more likely, they would have used joinery. They would build beautiful dovetailed joints and bang them together. How beautiful it would be to build it the way they would have, and reveal these joints.”

“It was one of those dream projects,” says architect Adam Wallace. Wallace came to architecture with a woodworking career under his belt, and he was delighted by the challenges of dovetailing the cabins together with the least possible visual interruption. “The dream was to draw focus toward the structure and ignite curiosity in people regarding what was supporting the roof above and the walls around them,” he says. To reduce embodied carbon as well as to create visual consistency, the cabins were built almost entirely of wood; there’s no ceiling, drywall, tile, or paint to be seen. In one of the cabins, Wallace removed the collar ties and ridge beam, using a concealed steel strap to ensure structural soundness. “Phil [Kaplan] and I were trying to reduce the number of lines,” Wallace says. “We literally looked at every wall. We didn’t want to have extra pieces, so rather than space the studs evenly, we let the doors and windows inform where the studs should go.” That way, the studs could replace what would have been additional frames for windows and doors. How minimalist could the doors and windows be? A traditional vertical-plank door is kept together by rails on the top and bottom and a diagonal brace on one side; could those be taken away? For answers, they enlisted Brian Lazarus of Opus One Studio. “If you want something crazy and difficult that almost doesn’t make sense, Brian’s your man,” says Kaplan. Lazarus created a door with no frame and no bracing (it involves a core of honeycomb aluminum, vacuum-suctioned with glue to the boards) and awning-style windows that look like those you’d expect to find in an old cabin, held open with a stick, but these very modern versions have laminated safety glass, screens, and an ingenious wooden device that opens and closes them.

“Every single piece of wood that went into that structure was carefully thought about,” says Katrina Belle of Maine Passive House, a carpenter on the project. “It’s one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever worked on. The time spent on the craft day to day, the level of skill of the carpenters on that project—it’s hard to quantify. It adds something you might not be able to see, but it’s there.” Jesper Kruse, owner of Maine Passive House, describes the project as a “jigsaw puzzle,” full of intricate problems to solve. “The only piece really hidden is the framing of the floor,” he says. “There literally is no trim; there’s nothing hidden. There’s no room for error.” For a team of dedicated craftspeople, this was “a treat,” he says. “We all shared the desire to make something extraordinary.”

If the simplicity of the buildings required unrelenting attention to detail, the landscape design called for a different approach, says Seth Kimball of Aceto Landscape Architects. His team focused on revegetating the site with native plants appropriate to the shoreline, providing “moments of refuge and privacy” among the structures and “working around the utilities and making them go away.” The homeowners “wanted it to feel wild, not manicured,” he says. “We had to loosen up our approach and let it happen organically, to see where it goes.” Plantings of native ferns and blueberries around the central firepit might eventually get nudged out by natural succession, for example. But the landscape was also designed for stability, using the site’s plentiful boulders to create “corners, thresholds, defined entrances, and transition points” across the property while carefully implementing erosion control to protect both the landscape and the lake. The new construction already feels settled on the land—the current phase of Kaplan’s imagined ancestral camp.

“These cabins are so solid and quiet,” says one of the homeowners. “They are elaborate in construction, but visually there’s no noise at all.” After many months of planning and problem solving, and great investments of time and expertise, the cabins are what they set out to be: simple. “When you are in them, they feel so soft,” says the homeowner. “When you’re walking around on the woodland floor, and then you walk into these cabins, it feels like they belong here.”