Merry-Go-Round: Simple but Clever Modern Vacation House

Symmetry sometimes seems like a lost art in a world increasingly filled with asymmetrical architecture. This elegantly simple modern box of a home almost disappears in the landscape in its closed configuration, a dull gray-green industrial-looking box lost in the forest.

Reversing the typical home floor plan, the circulation spaces are set around the outside rim of the interior space – a single continuous hallway wraps the whole structure and adds privacy to this otherwise open one-floor set of rooms within.

Rather than rely on clever built-in tricks, offbeat angles or ostentatious materials, architects of the Amsterdam firm Ira Koers allowed for the exterior pattern of this house to change organically with the opening and closing of window shudders operated by its occupants.