FORMA Architects has designed a compact shared house in the Hudson Valley woods

In the heart of the Hudson Valley, FORMA Architects has designed a compact yet strategically open house, conceived from the ambitious decision of the studio’s two co-founders (and friends) – Miroslava Brooks and Daniel Markiewicz – to purchase a plot of land in the middle of nature and to design a co-owned dwelling upon it.

During the pandemic, the urge for interpersonal connections and for a “cathartic” relationship with the outdoors led the two architects to reconsider their housing formulas (he living in Brooklyn with his wife, she renting in Stamford, Connecticut with her husband), as well as the economic challenges of accessing homeownership.
Between lockdowns, design revisions, and relocations, this dark timber cube suspended between a forest and a small lake evolved into a laboratory of resilient architecture. It offers a potential alternative housing model: the co-ownership of a deliberately reduced dwelling in order to minimize both the ecological footprint of construction on the landscape (and costs) while maintaining residential quality and management efficiency, opening the way to new forms of minimal and shared domesticity.

The three-level house, located in a predominantly wooded 9-acre site in Copake, north of New York, is designed in close perceptual and experiential dialogue with its surroundings. A stark cedar-clad cube rises atop the hill, blending with the forest’s hues; incisions in the external envelope play with orthogonal and oblique lines, shaping the ground-floor porch and the upper openings, and composing differentiated façades according to orientation and views. In contrast with the dark tones of the exterior cladding, the interiors unfold as crisp and luminous spaces, thanks to immaculate walls, light-wood finishes, and the natural light filtering through generous glazed surfaces.
A clear and functional layout ensures maximum flexibility and optimization of spaces for seasonal stays or long-term residence, safeguarding the autonomy and privacy of the sleeping quarters while sharing the daytime areas.
On the second floor, the living area—with its expansive windows—creates a bright central nucleus, acting as the beating heart of community life, around which the domestic spaces orbit; the fireplace acts as a pivot between kitchen, dining, and living, enhancing the functional and symbolic role of the hearth.
Stacked along west façade, the arrangement of three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms allows for a variety of autonomous solutions for different users (families, solo travelers, or the co-owners themselves).

The project lies within a continuum that connects the Existenzminimum of the Modern Movement—the research on “minimum” (yet dignified) and technologically replicable housing for the working class, conceived to reduce costs and respond to the housing crisis—to more recent experiments with “micro-houses,” sometimes even in co-management, whether in cities or in nature: dwellings that condense the meaning of inhabiting (and the relief of a reduced economic and ecological footprint) into just a few square meters. It reaffirms—echoing Hamlet—that one can feel like a “king of infinite space” even within a “nutshell.”