As Ruxandra rolls out dough for a blueberry pie in the kitchen — comprising a bank of walnut cabinets and appliances built into the central partition — she nods toward a six-foot-wide bean-shaped cutout in the wall above her to illustrate the more improvisational approach the couple took to designing a space for themselves. Both Christian and Ruxandra, who trained as an architect at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, typically gravitate toward straight lines and symmetry, “but we started with a square window for the sleeping loft and it was just too boring,” she says. Midway through the design process, she sketched a kidneylike shape on the plan as a placeholder, and neither of them ever revised it. “Usually,” she says, “we are a little more strict.”

FOR ALL ITS otherness, however, the home ultimately yields to the surrounding forest. The couple selected the piece of land, just over half an acre, because of its proximity to the Baltic, then positioned the house so it would look out over a mossy outcropping of granite. Each side of the building is punctuated with varying styles and sizes of plate-glass windows — nine in total — so that even in the gloom of midwinter, the spruces beyond are framed like pictures on the walls. Spanning the entire southern side of the main room is a 10-foot-wide pane that provides glimpses of the sea; flanked by a 15-foot-wide sliding glass door to the west and a hinged glass door to the east (both of which lead outside), it creates the impression that this part of the cabin — where the family often enjoys a midafternoon fika — is a pergola, open to the woods. In the bathroom, where glossy maroon wall tiles and a burgundy red jasper marble floor mimic the painted wooden floors throughout the rest of the house, a glass door allows guests to walk straight into the shower from the outside when they return from swimming in the sea in the summer or foraging for mushrooms in the fall.

Source: New York Times

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