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“I was looking for a design that had extreme flexibility. A design that could reflect the ease with which we change clothes,” said Schols in an interview with The Mansionist.

The prefabricated, modern-yet-rustic cabin essentially has four configurations. First, the wood and glass walls can be fully pushed together, keeping out the cold and other unfriendly elements. Second, the glass walls can also be pushed out at the ends of the edifice, fashioning sunrooms on each side to enjoy the view. Third, the wooden encasements can be pushed apart, leaving a glass solarium in the center. And finally, both sets of walls can be pushed open to reveal an open-air patio for enjoying the most beautiful of days.

The versatility of the cottage brings the magnificence of the outside in, even allowing residents to sleep under the stars in the comfort of their own bed. Fresh air makes up a third room in the cabin when the sun is shining, while the wonders of the surrounding environment are still visible whenever rain or snow falls.

In the winter, the cabin is kept contentedly cozy by both a wooden stove and an electric heating unit, along with five centimeters of sawdust insulation in the walls. In the summer, the heat is held at bay by opening the rectangular windows situated under the roof eaves.

“The windows also give a panoramic view, but only when seated in a chair, or after waking up and experiencing the view from the bed,” Schols explains. “This way, when the wood shells are closed, there is a warm, cozy, indoor atmosphere…This contrasts highly with the exposure, freedom, and openness that is experienced when only the glass shell is closed or everything is open.”

To construct this moving, layered home, Schols inserted two sets of rails into the foundation. The glass walls fit into the inner rails, while the thicker exterior slides along the outer set. He also used untreated and sustainably grown larch lumber to produce the shifting shells. “The structure is completely built in wood. I used it in the way they build traditional train stations. It’s a structure that cannot get its stability from its side walls… The trusses guarantee lateral stability,” the architect explains, adding that “wood is durable, easy to work with, smells great, looks great, and is environmentally friendly.”

Named in honor of his mother to thank her for all her support and trust, Schols says ANNA’s palindrome arrangement is also metaphorical. “It fits the house perfectly; it is a sort of code for the design. You can imagine the two wooden sliding bits to be the N’s and the two glass sliding bits to be the A’s.”

After graduating in physics from the University of Amsterdam, Schols erected a sliding garden house for his nature-loving mother. The unique shed soon generated fans around the world, earning him multiple design awards. He then went on to study at the Architectural Association of London before commercially producing the ANNA cabin.

Available in three models, the ANNA Stay is devised for all kinds of living, whether it be year-round or in seasonal intervals. Equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, and ladder-accessible loft large enough to fit a king-size bed, it can comfortably accommodate a family of four. By contrast, the ANNA Meet is a blank canvas of walls. The website says this model is ideal for yoga, meetings, and educational or creative settings.

The third iteration is the customizable ANNA Me. Based on customer preference and intention, Schols’ company will “design, build, and deliver complete turnkey concepts” in this version.

Priced starting at €83,000 (about $98,600, not including taxed or transportation), the ANNA cabin is delivered in a one-piece flat-pack and can be assembled almost anywhere on Earth. A fully-functional model is currently available for viewing in the Netherlands’ Maashorst wildlife reserve. It can also be inspected with a scheduled virtual tour.

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“All sliding doors can be shipped nationwide, including Canada. If your product is local, our installation team is available to lend a hand on your door project. Our in house CAD team will be able to pen down all aspects of your design concept to ensure a seamless installation.”

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To create such a transitory space in a colder part of the world, it seems like your walls would just have to disappear whenever you needed them to! If you’re like most people, then that sounds completely impossible to you. Even modern homes that have been equipped with sliding walls have to store them somewhere. Usually, that means overlapping the automatic walls with stationary ones or sacrificing some outdoor views. In an effort to solve this dilemma, Bergmeisterwolf Architekten has come up with a stunning alternative.

For “House F on Lake Garda,” a 250-square-meter extension of a 16th-century villa in Toscolano-Maderno, Italy, the firm created a series of sliding floor-to-ceiling windows that sink into the ground with the push of a button, turning an indoor space into a room that’s fully exposed to the elements. The design redefines what an indoor/outdoor space means by blurring the lines between the two areas more than ever before. Plus, it’s just plain fun to watch the walls in action, because they look like something out of a science-fiction film. Not bad, huh?

House F’s roof functions as a second-story terrace for the historic home and boasts an exterior staircase that leads down onto the lawn. The architects used dyed concrete “in symbiosis to the existing plastered stone facade” of the villa, contrasting modern and traditional styles in a way that isn’t too harsh or jarring. Warm wood accents brighten up the structure’s color palette and counter the roughness of the surrounding concrete. There’s a sense of harmony to the way space flows from the interiors of the original structure into those of the extension and finally out into the yard.

Outside, the rectilinear shapes of the glass-walled extension are echoed by a long and narrow lap pool, whose graduated floor gently slopes from the shallow end down to the deep. The pool reflects the sky and adds a sort of elemental balance to the lakeside lookout.

The architects describe the project as “[a]n integration of existing, new building and garden. A canopy to the house and again to the canopy. Glasses, which can be displaced downwards or disappears effect this change. Roofing, the roof at the same time developed as a terrace with an integrated exterior staircase develops as a connecting element between the garden and the garden… working with distances, and interspaces. Integrated into the garden itself, a bathing house is created, positioned between an existing limonaia wall and the 100-year-old palms.”

All photos by Gustav Willeit

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Anyone who has ever lived in a studio apartment has probably wished they could somehow hide their bed, clothing and other personal items from view to free up space when guests are visiting. If you’re a minimalist with the right kind of transforming and multi-purpose furniture, perhaps you could make it work, shifting the purpose of your space from one to another without having to actually move anything out of your apartment. But a few built-in items could achieve the same effect with less effort.

A movable wall, a murphy bed and a series of sliding panels transform one small space for five different uses in this ingeniously renovated micro apartment in New York City. Architecture firm MKCA ensures that activities like lounging, entertaining, sleeping and primping can all be spaciously accommodated, so long as you only need to do one of them at a time.

Slide the portable volume away from the wall to reveal a dressing area with a closet, mirror and built-in dresser drawers. Once it’s fully extended, you can pull down the murphy bed for a cozy little bedroom. When it’s all closed up, the space on the other side can function as a living room or office, with the desk and even more storage tucked behind a series of doors to reduce clutter.

The sliding component contains audio and visual hardware, so you can watch television and enjoy other media from either side. An adjacent space is freed up for dining and other activities, while the kitchen and bathroom are tucked away on the other end of the studio.

Via the architects:

“Situated in a 1920’s co-op building in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan, the apartment was entirely reimagined by MKCA. A sliding storage element glides from one end of the room to the other, revealing and exchanging spaces between daytime and nighttime zones. As the moving volume pulls away from the wall, it reveals a dressing room space with built-in clothing storage. Fully extended, the space for a queen-sized fold-down bed is created. The sliding element is powered and cabled for a television and houses all of the audiovisual and networking components of the apartment along with additional storage and display space. A pivoting enclosure with custom speakers allows the television to rotate 180 degrees for viewing from the seating area, or the bed and dressing rooms. At the opposite end of the room are spaces for a home office, a dry bar, and library.”

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A small apartment in Madrid that offered very little space for multiple functions is transformed with the addition of a series of sliding chipboard units containing the kitchen, bedroom and storage. The units can be pushed together into a single volume or divided to create one or more rooms within the available space.

‘All I Own House’ by PKMN Architectures modifies the client’s apartment, which formerly belonged to her grandmother, to make the space far more versatile than it has ever been without sacrificing the large open space adjacent to the new built-in cabinetry.

It takes just minutes to change that space from a bedroom to a kitchen, living room or study, with the dividers placed on industrial sliding rails. A dining/work table and the bed both fold down from their respective cabinets.

Each unit offers plenty of storage for items like books, clothes, linens and tableware, which can be hidden away to reduce clutter. The chosen material, oriented strand board (OSB), makes the project highly affordable while also adding some texture and warmth to the room.

The project was created for a woman named Yolanda. The architects describe how they came to this design for her:

“Yolanda moves to the house that formerly belonged to her grandmother, it is located on a small housing community in the North of Madrid. It is a single storey house, rather small, but it has an enormous garden in the backyard. Yolanda is, among many other things, ERREPILA [Design Studio for enterprising and courageous people].”

“All I Own House materialises the interior of Yolanda’s house through her personal belongings. But these objects, such as Yolanda, would never stand still, they move around with her, accompanying her way through the day; early in the morning all the books wake up and place themselves together with all the clothing stuff, bed disappears and, just as Yolanda is having a coffee, books and clothes move fast approaching the kitchen area in order to make room for shower. Around mid-morning Yolanda has an appointment with a client; all the crockery, carefully tidy, starts to put itself close to the kitchen, nearby all the cutlery and the rest of the cookware. Books are now showing off, very proud, the big round blackboard is now getting ready for the meeting…”

“Through a carefully made design, totally custom-made, and the combination of carpentry and the use of quite a simple industrial railing system, all the server space in the house is arranged through three wooden, suspended, mobile and transformable containers. This server space can be totally re arranged in just a few seconds, thus allowing, in a variety of combinations with served space, to adapt the whole house according to specific needs for the use of space at the time, enabling infinite homes within a house.”

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Ordinary and perhaps even a little boring when fully closed, this cabinet hides a secret that’s like a streak of madness in an otherwise prim and proper person. Just start tugging at one of the beams that make up the front and back facades, and you’ll start a process of controlled destruction that completely obliterates the cabinet’s original form.

Made of maple, glass and stainless steel, ‘Explosion’ is a showcase of cabinetry expertise, demonstrating just how far the traditional woodworking technique of dovetailing can go (literally.) One piece of wood slides against the next, so that they can all be moved individually to either side, up to their full length.

Pull it completely apart until it seems as if the wood can’t support its own weight anymore, or stop somewhere in the process of the ‘explosion’ for a totally custom and highly unusual shape.

Of course, a piece this complex also required some new techniques that had to be refined by artist Sebastian Errazuriz over the course of a year. ‘Explosion’ will be on display at the artist’s solo show, ‘Look Again,’ at the Carnegie Museum of Art beginning September 6th, 2014.

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A well-appointed kitchen that can accommodate large groups and the needs of a serious chef generally requires quite a lot of space. But when kitchen surfaces and storage elements slide, fold and swivel, you can pack a lot of function into a much more compact room. ‘The Cut’ by Alessandro Isola is a reconfigurable kitchen consisting of a central island, ceiling-mounted cabinets and a wall unit.

Rather than opening out, which would require a step stool, the upper storage space pulls down for easy access to cookware and seasonings. A large table surface can be pulled out to extend the counter space, or swiveled to accommodate up to six diners.

The island contains the oven and stove, while the wall unit hides a sink, small kitchen appliances and plenty of wine storage. Three seating cubes slide under the kitchen counter when not in use.

“The Cut recognizes the kitchen as a practical yet central space, a place to grab-and-go, congregate and chat, to relax and dine. It’s designed to understand that each of these occasions present themselves daily in our modern lives,” says the designer.

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New York-based architectural firm Studio Garneau believes that your home should work for you, not against you. They think that an apartment should adapt to fit the needs of the owners, not the other way around. To embody this philosophy, they created Transformer: an apartment that changes shape and configuration to meet the needs and wants of its occupants.

The multi-functional loft space opens and closes based on where the occupants need to be and what they need to do. The living room is separated from the bedroom by a large sliding wall; when the wall is “closed,” or closing the space between the living room and bedroom, built-in wooden bookshelves are revealed. They are hidden when the wall is slid “open” again, creating a clean, minimalist appearance.

The bedroom itself contains a Murphy bed, or a bed that lifts up and disappears into the wall when not in use. With the bed up and off of the floor, the resident has a comfortable spot in which to practice yoga. Hiding the bed in this way also keeps the space looking tidy and uncluttered.

There is a theme of layers throughout the apartment. Layers of seen and unseen objects, layers of rich oiled wood and clean white surfaces, layers of personal and public areas. Bespoke furniture with hidden storage and ingenious little space-saving touches tie the home together and allow for optimum space utilization. Even the sliding wall doesn’t stop at serving one or two purposes – it also acts as a large projector screen when in the closed position.

The overall footprint of the apartment is tiny, but it contains everything needed to live comfortably – and even stylishly. The Transformer apartment proves that it’s not the size of the living space – it’s what you do with it that counts.

Here’s the studio’s description of the project:

“A dilapidated multi-room pre-war apartment is transformed into a modern, adaptable open space, providing an urban sanctuary above the frenzy of New York City. A flexible, adaptive mini-loft that emphasizes open views while providing supportive functionality — architecture and furniture opens, folds and slides, responding to different uses.”

“Built-in cabinetry and custom designed furniture maximize space and flexibility. White painted walls and doors, conceal lush interiors of oiled walnut, enclosing libraries, artwork, office supplies, clothing and precious mementos.”

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What can a parent do when building pillow forts and playing hide and seek start to bore the kids? If you’re lucky enough to have the space and budget for it, you turn your home into SkyHouse: a playground-like home with a climbing wall and four-story slide.

SkyHouse was designed by architect David Hotson to occupy a spectacular four-story loft at the top of an historic skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. The American Tract Society built the structure in 1895, and it is currently one of the oldest skyscrapers in New York. The top four floors had remained unoccupied and unfinished since the building’s construction, giving the owners free reign to make it into their dream home.

The main level of the home occupies the entire first-story floor space. The second level is a mezzanine overlooking the space below and occupied by a home office. The third story is all bedrooms and the fourth story is a glass-floored attic arranged just below the supporting roof truss. Large windows all around the perimeter of the home provide for an abundance of natural light on every level.

But of course, the most notable features of the home are the ones that make it so much fun. A private elevator takes residents and visitors all the way up to the SkyHouse. Once inside, the color palette is a clean, modern white with whimsical, colorful accents peppered throughout the space. An exposed steel girder in the living room provides upward transportation in the form of a rock climbing wall. A small platform midway up the 50-foot wall allows private space for reading or gazing out at the spectacular skyline.

The stainless steel slide begins its twisty-turning journey in the attic, where a hole in the glass floor allows the mouth of the slide to rise up to meet riders. Small windows in the slide keep it from being dark and scary. Exit points at the second and third stories let riders disembark at different stops rather than going all the way to the first level.

The SkyHouse offers the best of both worlds: a highly livable and comfortable space for grown-ups and all the fun of a playground for kids. Those with a fear of heights may not enjoy the incredible views offered by the multitude of large windows looking out over Manhattan, but we’re willing to bet that there is something to delight just about everyone in this amazing house.

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It hardly gets more modern than this – a white volume, planes sliding past one another in space, in a way that would do Mies or Corbu proud.

For the situation and site near Lima, the effect is quite perfect. This house in Lima needed to be open to the elements but still feel like a fully-finished and contemporary residence.

Hence the raised-off-the-ground element of detachment despite windowless openings, and the living-room whites found throughout – classically Modernist moves.

Javier Artadi Arquitecto started with a series of boxes, then sliced strategically through them per the program. The result reflects the flat linear horizons, but also frames views of this simple natural landscape – it affords visibility but still provides a sense of enclosure as well. Other projects have a similar look; the firm specializes in clean, minimalist lines and rectilinear shapes in stark white. The style calls to mind a sort of Aegean futurism, but most of the projects are set in South America.

“The project consists of a small house on a beach a hundred miles south of Lima and explores the expansion of the conventional uses of a beach house. To that end, a container box has been created, a space that integrates the living-dining room and terrace with pool, within which various elements have been designed (conventional and unconventional furniture) that offer multiple use options.”

“Architecturally, the volume has been strategically perforated along some planes in order to control sunlight and to achieve a selective visual approach (towards the sky, the sea, etc.), and it has been deliberately suspended above the garden to add an air of weightlessness and freedom to the architectural experience of the users.”

“Functionally, the main volume is surrounded by sleeping and service areas. There the kitchen and master bedroom can be found, which are both visually connected with the terrace and pool, and through them, with the skyline.”

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We expect small sliding wood doors, or larger industrial-steel ones, but rock is rarely something you see moving with any grace or stealth.

A very elegant, yet complex, workaround, this electric sliding wall serves to accommodate local building requirements that the replacement home have the same small windows as the old stone structure that stood there before.

Along the same lines, restrictions prevented a two-story high, so the entire structure had to be sunk half a floor to accommodate a second level above.

But the beauty is that the casual visitor would never knew that necessity drove these design decisions – independently, they add character, complexity and functionality to the home by British architects Baynes & Co.

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