My favourite Airbnb: A sculptural sanctuary in the heart of the Hudson Valley

The house sits on 28 acres preserved as one continuous property and completed in 2016. It reads as both a home and a small luminous museum. The design comes from an initiative focused on architecture as interior experience, shaping spaces from within and tying them to the environment. Instead of expanding outward, the house compresses, pulls inward, and creates volume through voids. At 918 square feet, it stacks, overlaps, and folds to reject sprawl while keeping the space visually cohesive with little concealment. It uses mahogany frames, birch plywood walls, thin curved wood layers, and super-insulated plywood construction with minimal steel. There is no drywall and no cosmetic finish, relying on natural oiled wood and plywood interior finishes.

"Completed in 2016 by Steven Holl - one of the most influential contemporary architects working today - the Ex of In House sits on 28 acres that were originally meant to be split into five suburban homes. Instead, the land was preserved as one continuous property, and this house became the alternative: a structure that somehow reads like both a home and a small, luminous museum."

"The project of a house comes out of Holl's ongoing research initiative, "Explorations of IN," which looks at architecture less as object and more as interior experience - with spaces "shaped from within" and tied closely to their environment. Rather than building outward into the landscape, the house does the opposite: it compresses, pulls inward, and "creates volume through voids.""

"At just 918 square feet, the house rejects sprawl entirely - the design stacks, overlaps, and folds in on itself. Holl's idea was to create a space that remains visually cohesive, with very little concealed. Today, it's positioned less as a standalone home and more as part of a larger experimental landscape - an architectural response to the surrounding forest rather than an imposition on it."

"With that same bringing-the-outside-in mindset, the house is made almost entirely from raw materials: mahogany window and door frames, birch plywood walls, and thin curved layers of wood throughout. Super-insulated plywood construction minimises the use of steel, and like most of Holl's other properties, there's notably no drywall, nor any cosmetic finish. As stated in the home's welcome booklet, "All-natural oiled wood and plywood interior finishes are part of the Arte Povera materiality and""

Read at CN Traveller