YUMI Architekci Sets a Pale Brick Gable on a Timber Base to Turn the Holiday Cabin into a Year-Round Home

Every Polish city has a ring of weekend plots where the holiday cabin was once the dream: a steep roof, a stove, a deck, a garden full of birches. Warsaw-based YUMI Architekci, led by Marta Szadokierska and Dorota Wilczynska, take that figure seriously in Elementary House, a 134 m² home completed in 2026 in Izbica, on the outskirts of Warsaw. The house is not a seasonal retreat. It is a full-time residence that keeps the cabin's silhouette and its ease while carrying the program of a family home.

What makes the project worth your attention is not the archetype itself; pitched-roof nostalgia is everywhere. It is how precisely the architects split the house into two materials with two jobs. A pale grey brick gable carries the house's identity, with a single round window as its face. Below and along the sides, a timber-clad ground floor opens to decks, sliding doors and the garden. The result reads as a drawing a child might make, then holds up under close inspection at the eaves, the verges and the soffits.

An Archetype Drawn With One Line

Seen from the gravel drive, the house is almost a pictogram: a steep gable, a round window, a glazed entrance bay. YUMI resists the temptation to dress it up. There are no dormers competing with the gable, no projecting balconies, no secondary roof forms. The skylights in the long roof plane are flush and quiet, so the triangle stays intact.

That restraint is the point. A holiday cabin works on memory and recognition, and a full-time house risks losing that once you add bedrooms, storage and plant rooms. Here the extra program is absorbed inside a single compact volume, and the outside stays as simple as the name suggests.

Brick Above, Timber Below

The material logic inverts what you might expect. Masonry usually grounds a building and timber floats above it. In Izbica, the pale brick sits up in the gable while the vertical timber cladding wraps the base, where hands, shoulders and dogs actually touch the house. The close-up of brick resting on a timber soffit, above knotty boards, shows how deliberately that junction is handled: the brick does not pretend to bear on the ground, and the wood does not pretend to be heavier than it is.

The pale, almost white-washed tone of the brick matters too. It keeps the gable light against the trees and lets the dappled shadows read across it, so the heaviest material on the house ends up the most responsive to the garden.

The Round Window, Inside and Out

The circular timber-framed window is the house's signature, and it earns its place on both sides of the wall. From outside it is an eye in the gable. From inside, it frames the upper floor under the pitched timber ceiling, where a rocking chair and a white balustrade catch the sunlight it lets in. One opening does the work of both iconography and atmosphere.

We like that the window is set tight below the roof edge rather than centred in a vast expanse of brick. It sits where the space under the ridge is most intimate, which is exactly where you would want to sit and look out.

Porches, Decks and Firewood

The architects describe the house as shaped by everyday rituals, and the edges of the building are where that claim is tested. A covered timber porch with a row of narrow windows, a plank deck stepping down to the lawn, a gravel strip planted with lavender, a stacked firewood shelter glowing in the shade: these are not decorative extras. They are the places where a cabin life actually happens.

The deck runs low and continuous along the timber volume, so the threshold between inside and garden is a step rather than a terrace. It feels less like a suburban patio and more like the porch of a forest hut, which is the right register for a site wrapped in mature trees.

Living Under the Overhang

Deep roof overhangs shelter the sliding glass doors and the wide window bands of the ground floor. In practice this means you can leave the doors open in rain, keep high summer sun off the glass, and still read the garden through broad, timber-framed openings. The photograph of a dog crossing the deck in dappled light says more about the project's intent than any diagram.

The overhang also does compositional work. It shades the glazed base into a darker band, which makes the brick gable and roof appear to hover slightly. The house looks rooted and light at once.

Detail as Discipline

A pared-back archetype lives or dies at the edges, because there is nothing else for the eye to land on. YUMI keeps the verge to a slim grey metal flashing where roof meets brick, and finishes the eaves with grey fibre cement trim over a timber soffit. Nothing is oversized, and the gutters do not clutter the silhouette.

This is the unglamorous work that separates a convincing contemporary cabin from a pastiche. The roof edge stays thin enough that the gable still reads as a clean triangle from the lawn.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan places the rectangular footprint on an elongated plot among scattered trees, with the driveway kept to one side. On the ground floor, the kitchen, living and dining area, master bedroom, bathroom, storage and mechanical rooms are arranged around a central hall. Upstairs, two bedrooms, a bathroom and storage share a hall with a mezzanine, which turns the leftover space under the ridge into a small sitting room overlooking the floor below.

The cross section shows how steep the roof really is, and how much usable volume it yields for the upper floor. The longitudinal section ties the stair to the upper gallery rail, confirming that the two levels are visually connected rather than stacked as separate floors. The eave detail, credited alongside structural engineering by LG concept, lays out the insulation layers, gutter and drip at the wall junction that keep that thin roof edge possible.

The elevations make the material split legible: a brick end wall with its round window over a glazed ground floor, and a long tiled roof plane with small windows and two chimneys. The axonometric and its massing diagrams show how the volume was tested before settling on the simplest form.

Why This Project Matters

Peri-urban Poland is filling up with houses that either mimic historical cottages badly or abandon the pitched roof for generic boxes. Elementary House shows a third path. It accepts the archetype that people want, then makes it rigorous through a clear material division, careful detailing and a plan compact enough to justify the form. At 134 m², it also argues that a year-round home does not need to sprawl to feel generous.

For you as a designer, the lesson is that familiarity is not the enemy of contemporary architecture. A round window, a steep gable and a porch can carry real meaning if each element has a job and the junctions between them are resolved. YUMI Architekci have built a house that looks simple because the hard decisions were made early and held to the end.

Elementary House by YUMI Architekci (Marta Szadokierska, Dorota Wilczynska), Izbica, Poland. Area: 134 m². Year: 2026. Photographs by Piotr Krajewski.

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