These two young artists quit their jobs to build this glass house for $500
Plenty of natural sunlight isn’t an unusual quality of a dream home. But what about a home built completely of glass so the light would never be hidden? For a pair of young artists, a beautiful sunset and a thoughtful conversation led to the construction of a breathtaking retreat in mountainous West Virginia.
Photographer Nick Olson, 27, who works with old-fashioned labor-intensive photographic processes, and designer Lilah Horwitz, 23, who makes “site-specific clothing,” met at an artist’s residency in Pennsylvania. Early on in their relationship, Olson invited Horwitz to join him on a trip to his family’s property in southern West Virginia. One evening, the two went on a walk in the woods that resulted in an artistic vision.
[Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow of the glass cabin.]
As the sun sank behind a hill, the couple began talking about how amazing the light appeared at that moment. What if, they pondered, there could be a living space where light changed based on the time of day?
“Light is so different in the morning, at noon and at dusk. We wanted to somehow build a house so that change happened in our living space,” Olson said. “It’s about being closer to living with the elements.”
Both Olson and Horwitz had summer plans to work at their current jobs, but agreed they had suddenly discovered a project worth pursuing.
In what Olson calls a “spur-of-the-moment decision,” the new couple quit their jobs, rented a U-Haul and began driving state to state to find the right windows for their retreat.
[Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow of the glass cabin.]
The couple’s unique cabin was featured in “Half Cut Tea,” a Web video series that explores artists and their works. (Their episode is at the bottom of this blog post.) Olson is friends with one of the series creators, Jordan Wayne Long, a performance artist originally from Bald Knob, Arkansas, who interviewed the couple and showcased their cabin.
Most of the windows the couple collected were found or scavenged, Olson said. Some were purchased, but not many. The first the couple found was in a big stack of old windows at an abandoned barn in Pennsylvania. Horwitz describes finding that window as “serendipitous.”
When they had collected enough glass, the two began constructing the cabin on the family land near New River Gorge National River park. The closest town to the property is Hinton, West Virginia, Olson said.
The building process was sometimes frustrating, Horwitz said. The two built the entire structure themselves – their only audience was the occasional curious deer, rabbit or fox. The home’s front window wall is about 16 feet high, but the base of the structure is another 4 feet off the ground, Horwitz said.
“It was just the two of us trying to put up these gigantic posts. It was scary and hard,” she said. “Looking at it now, it’s just totally insane. It’s huge. I realize now that’s what makes it so amazing.”
Olson credits an artistic vision and frugality with their success. While living on a diet of rice and beans, the two used nails, wood and anything salvageable from an old barn on the property to piece their structure together. They estimate they spent $500 in total on the project.
[Click here or on a photo to go to a slideshow of the glass cabin.]
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