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“This house is a retreat from busy city lives that encourages a slower way of living by the beach,

Founded in 1958 by the Finnish Saarelainen brothers in Eastern Finland, Honka—known as Honkarakenne in Finland—was the first industrial manufacturer of log houses. Today, the pioneer brand has built almost 85,000 houses across the globe, including a quaint Scottish retreat for the Queen of England in 1969. Pictured here is an exterior view of Kide, a sauna cabin located on the west coast of Finland.

Candour is a prefab building system and a tool to customize building components within that system—including walls, floors, facades, and roofs—with a proprietary CAD plug-in. Users of the software can draft a design, determine if it’s feasible, and price it all in one day. Designs are built at Candour’s manufacturing facility in Sunshine, Melbourne.

“It’s a beautiful part of the world,” says architect Alan Dickson about Scotland's Isle of Skye. “The downside of that beauty is that land is expensive and very difficult for young people to afford, so they’re leaving the island.” In 2010, Dickson, of the Skye-based firm Rural Design, and local builder James MacQueen came up with a solution: a small timber-frame prefab design called the R.House, which can be constructed quickly and tucked onto less expensive lots that don’t appeal to well-heeled holiday homeowners. Photo by Marcus McAdam.

The homes are painted wood, and include a shaded deck space, plus full insulation and electricity, for a price of about $29,000.

When Oslo-based architect Marianne Borge was approached in 2004 by a client who wanted an actual cabin rather than a second home, she was instantly inspired by the challenge of working on a smaller scale. The home, called Woody35, has a distinct shape that makes it stand out from its surroundings despite the modest size of the building.

The weeHouse exteriors are clad in corrugated Cor-Ten, but with a custom pattern of folds to create an organic randomness. The foundations were designed with a shallow recess around the top to make the modules look like they’re hovering. After they bought the property in early 2014, the Siegels camped there for two summers while they saved up money and planned a permanent structure. In his research, BJ came across this design, a customizable prefab house by Alchemy Architects. "Of all the things that I found, I was drawn to that one because it was absolutely the simplest and cleanest," he says.

A small kitchenette comes complete with a cook top and oven. White oak wood flooring is used throughout, as a standard feature.

Designed by Arba, the retreat’s enclosed garden provides outdoor space out of the wind while the cuts give it a strong connection with the setting.

At the front of the main house, architect Danny Lim framed one of the original windows with new trim to give it a more modern feel and installed limestone on the porch and steps.

Pool and pool house as the sun sets.

The black paint on the exterior timber cladding is similar to “falu red”, a permeable red paint commonly used on wooden cottages and barns in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The paint consists of water, rye flour, linseed oil, silicates, iron oxides, copper compounds, and zinc. When it is time to repaint the house, the old paint is simply brushed or scrubbed away.

The cottage is located on a site just over an hour from Gothenburg and two-and-a-half hours from Oslo, Bohuslän was the ideal location. “We immediately fell in love with the slightly hilly site and its location along a narrow dirt road with cows grazing on the other side,” says Helena. “Until then, I had never thought of building a summer house but when we got the chance, we just had to take it. Especially when my old friend Susanna said she could design a house for us.”