The Findling
The Findling is a rural retreat commissioned by two psychoanalysts from Manhattan seeking to redefine their relationship with architecture. After a previously challenging building experience, the clients felt disconnected from their bucolic property in Austerlitz, New York. To remedy this, they turned to Brooklyn-based architects Of Possible, tasking them with designing a retreat that was restorative, not only in its design but also in its making.
This impetus resulted in the Findling — an almost otherworldly escape that appears to float lightly above the landscape. Achieved through simple yet highly considered methods and materials, this 980-square-foot cabin serves as a retreat for writing and solitude and doubles as a guest house for visiting friends and family.
At its foundation, the project is composed of three elemental parts, each defined by a singular material: the dwelling itself, constructed entirely from locally harvested larch; the four 500-million-year-old glacial erratic boulders that support it; and a thin stainless-steel stair that forms the vertical threshold between ground and building. These three materials — wood, stone, and metal — interact as a choreographed sequence, heightening awareness of movement through the project.
The name “Findling” holds a dual meaning in German: both “orphan” and “glacial erratic”. Architect Vincent Appel borrowed the term after a visiting philosopher friend identified the supporting stones as findlings. Literally, the home is built atop four such boulders, their mass holding the structure lightly above the land. Metaphorically, the term expresses a process of emotional restoration and rediscovery — an architectural effort intended to heal and reset the clients’ relationship to this site and to the act of building itself.
From the approach, the home appears to float just above the terrain. A slender stainless-steel stair — the project’s “third space” — descends from the structure, bridging the distance between forest floor and elevated platform. Doors and stairs typically provide the minimum articulation between inside and out; here, the stair is designed to expand that threshold into a heightened perceptual experience.
Engineered through finite-element digital analysis, the stair is reduced to its thinnest possible expression, reading as neither of the earth nor of the building. Custom-perforated treads and a ribbon-like handrail introduce unfamiliar yet tactile cues, encouraging awareness that one is stepping from the familiar path in the woods into something intentionally other.
Rather than an exterior entry sequence terminating at a front door, visitors arrive directly into the centre of the house, entering through its heart to communicate the feeling of an embrace. The plan is symmetrical yet varied in spatial experience.
Two compact bedrooms and one bath occupy the corners — each with a large fixed window and operable wooden shutters — recalling the scale and spirit of a treehouse bunk. The central living and dining space expands outward with floor-to-ceiling glass, creating an alternating rhythm of compression and release inspired by regional mountaineering lodges and backcountry cabins.
Materially, the house is elemental and singular. The structure is built almost entirely from larch harvested from nearby forests, chosen for its durability, warmth, economy, and spiritual clarity. To minimise complexity and material footprint, windows are mulled directly into solid larch jambs and glazed on site.
Portions of the wall pivot open for ventilation, eliminating the need for mechanical hardware or framed openings. Opening a window becomes not a technical mechanism but a physical gesture — an intimate act of participation with climate and landscape.
Half of the building rests on a historic New England stone wall, likely constructed between 1770 and 1830 when the land was first cleared for farming. Now buried within the forest, these walls are quiet artefacts of regional history, tying the retreat into a continuum of habitation.
Throughout the interior, details are guided by restraint. The kitchen island is carved from a single block of Vermont Verde serpentine quarried in Barre, Vermont — the same quarry that supplied Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building planters. Its deep green veining was left unpolished to feel like a fragment of hillside drifted indoors.
Door and shutter hardware fabricated by Ize reinterprets Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery handles, here cast in stainless steel to match the home’s material palette.
The Findling is both dwelling and transformation. Resting on ancient stones, lifted by the lightness of wood, and reached through a suspended metal passage, it is less an addition to the land than a rediscovery of it — an architecture designed to move perception from the subliminal to the supraliminal, inviting an emotional relationship with place.
