Cabins for Wildwood State Park

New York state’s vast park system features accommodations that are booked more than half a million nights each year. The grounds, campsites, cabins, and cottages—many of which were built under a New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program—are now undergoing a transformation as part of NY Parks 2020, a $900 million program to improve and repair deteriorating infrastructure and facilities across the system. Nearly a third of the money, which comes from a combination of public and private sources, is earmarked for improvements to recreational facilities, including campgrounds.

NY Parks 2020 funded a $9 million project to add the first cabin structures to Wildwood State Park and Heckscher State Park, both located on Long Island. For the project’s first phase, New York City–based WXY Architecture + Urban Design created a set of 10 new cabins at Wildwood State Park, which began opening for rentals on Memorial Day weekend. WXY’s scheme involves two cabin types—a 670-square-foot one-bedroom and a 784-square-foot two-bedroom—and grouping all 10 cabins on a site immediately north of an existing tent campground.

Design and construction were completed on a tight budget and with very particular requirements. “It’s like doing tiny public buildings,” says WXY principal in charge Claire Weisz, FAIA. “They need to be robust, fully accessible, and accommodate all ages.” The cabin designs couldn’t be too complicated either because the park staff would be responsible for construction and maintenance. So the structures use conventional wood-frame construction and sit above grade on exposed concrete caissons.

The final site plan was determined in situ: WXY’s designers staked the location of each cabin with flags and adjusted the composition in the rolling landscape to give the perception of diverse forms, while leaving the forest as untouched as possible.

The cabin’s exteriors are simple, comprising unfinished cedar shingles, ipe decking, and galvalume roofing. “It was important that [the buildings] speak to our early group of 1930s cabins, but are built with an aesthetic that’s contemporary,” says Angelyn Chandler, the former deputy commissioner for capital programs of New York State Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (she recently joined the New York City Economic Development Corp.). The shingles match those cladding utility structures in the park and will eventually weather to camouflage with the surrounding trees, a mix of species that includes cedar.

The cabins’ irregularly pitched roofs emphasize the site’s terrain on the exterior and help define living spaces in the interior. On both cabin configurations, the roof ridge line matches the boundary between interior and exterior spaces. In each cabin, the low point in the roofline shelters the master bedroom, ensuring the quietest space is also the most snug and private.

The interiors are even simpler than the envelope, and feature ash plank flooring, 8-inch-wide tongue-and-groove knotty pine wall boards nailed directly to the studs, and birch plywood board-and-batten ceilings. “We used very traditional materials on the cabin,” Weisz says, “but stripped the form to its essential features.”

The cabins’ simple program includes a bathroom, kitchenette, and screened outdoor porch. In the two-bedroom unit, the kitchen/living area is 12 feet wide by 23 feet long; a barn door to the second bedroom can slide open to enlarge the communal space during the day. The living area of the one-bedroom variation is just 12.5 feet by 16 feet, but opens onto a screen porch for additional square footage. The kitchens are small, but each is equipped with a sink, refrigerator, microwave, and electric range cooktop with oven, as well as DuPont Corian countertops. Bathrooms are somewhat sparse, but fully accessible with zero-entry showers.

One major difference between the original CCC cabins and WXY’s cabins are the latter’s bigger windows, which were designed to maximize cross-ventilation and views. The cabins have no air conditioning, relying solely on breezes and well-placed windows and ceiling fans for cooling. While the cabins aren’t currently available for rental during the winter, they are fully insulated and have radiant heating through copper mesh located under the floors that would allow all-season use in the future.

This summer will prove the cabins’ place in the New York state parks’ roster of accommodations. “Visitors have come to the same parks and cabins for decades,” Chandler says. “Hopefully these projects will bring new people to the parks who will start their own traditions.” Staff, family, and friends from WXY reserved four of the cabins for a long weekend this summer. “We’re going to test it out,” says Tim Bacheller, a senior architectural and urban designer at WXY. An additional 10 cabins, of the same designs, are expected to grace the Wildwood State Park landscape in the future.

Project Credits
Project: Cabins for Wildwood State Park, Long Island, N.Y.
Client/General Contractor: New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Long Island Region Architect: WXY Architecture + Urban Design, New York . Claire Weisz, FAIA (principal in charge); Mark Yoes, FAIA (design principal); Layng Pew, AIA (principal); Tim Bacheller (project manager, senior architectural & urban designer); Justine Shapiro-Kline (senior planner & urban designer); Ariel Millan (architectural designer)
Mechanical/Structural/Electrical Engineer/Landscape Architect: Stantec
Civil Engineer: Cashin Associates
Size: 670 square feet (one-bedroom cabins); 784 square feet (two-bedroom cabins)
Cost: $3 million

This article appeared in ARCHITECT's June 2018 issue.