(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Mountain Home Design 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Download the entire magazine here)

This isn't just any cabin, not in any traditional sense anyway.

It is cozy, no doubt about that.

It does not tower over the tree canopy, and its color palette is that of the landscape.

But from that point on, Malibu architect Edward Niles, 71, and his architect daughter, Lisa, left the grid.

"It's hard to call it a cabin, I know," he said during a late afternoon conversation.

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Mammoth Home And Design Special
Moving Toward Contemporary
Elliott Brainard's Tree House
The Niles Family 'Cabin'
Stretching The Meaning Of 'Green'
Larry Walker And Artistic Design
Corrine Brown And The New Technology
Robin Stater's Rugged Designs

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The Niles cabin is a concrete, steel and glass cube, topped by a flat copper roof, which the family uses as an observation deck. It is just 1,600 square feet, small by new standards of home construction in Mammoth. It’s the type of cabin that will never appear on an L.L. Bean catalog cover, which is precisely the point.

Niles, for thirty-two years a professor of architecture at the University of Southern California and whose work appears in a dozen books as well as in all the leading architecture journals, sat in a comfortable chair during the conversation.

From where he sat, he gained a three-hundred and sixty degree view of the Mammoth outdoors.

In the distance, on one side, were the Sherwins. Branches from trees were just outside the windows. The hard, dusty slope and its tough groundcover rose from the back panels of glass.

It was as if we were outdoors, except that we were in fact indoors, in the living room of one of the most talked-about homes in Mammoth.

What to make of it?

"The days of stick construction, of cutting down trees and building walls out of studs and doing all the wood siding, is in many respects a violation of every reason you're here to begin with," he said, "which is to leave the forest alone. That may seem a little off the wall, but I believe that's very much true. There's no house that I have done for over thirty years that is really built of wood. Everything has been built of steel, of concrete, of materials that do not encroach on what I consider to be an environmental issue.

"I started well before Al Gore."

Niles, a well-known and respected architect who lives near his pal Frank Gehry and built the home that Johnny Carson inhabited, speaks in pleasant, measured sentences with a professorial tone. A conversation with Niles is part history lecture, part FutureSpeak and very much on topic of how to consider modern architecture and its relation to nature.

"My design sense comes from an attitude about nature and the very simplistic argument about how things are put together," he said. "I call that nature. My own background is wanting to be an architect in the truest sense of the word: creating and building objects and forms. That's always intrigued me ever since I can remember.

"I’m not particularly interested in resurrecting the past; I’m interested in taking the ideas of the past and moving forward with those ideas. Combine that with a certain sensitivity to nature and a strong engineering background, it's like building a somewhat of a composition. It's not a layered idea, it's more of a mixture.

"I'm really very uncomfortable with resurrecting or reinterpreting images of the past. It's primarily because I just don't see that way.

"For example, when somebody says ‘snow’ to me, I think of it as a beautiful thing. It's like an incredible blanket. It's an object. It doesn’t suggest to me pitched roofs, or that it’s going to fall on the car and destroy it.

"I came to Mammoth in particular and the first thing I tried to do was to acquire a piece of property where I'd be free of the traditional imagery of the past and find what seems to be correct as far as I interface with nature and the weather, snow, all of these things.

"One reason for this house was to develop something vertically so that we'd capture the longer view of Mammoth and were not submerged within trees. Another reason was to take advantage of the tremendous sun and the high, dry desert climate versus being up, for example, in Tahoe, or in Vail. It's totally different environment and totally different resolution."

Because of its steel and glass construction, along with a flat roof that allows snow to act as insulation, the Niles home uses very little fuel for heat. It faces south and east so that the sun heats the home in the morning, particularly in the winter. The interior of the cube is standard oak paneling. Everything in it is simple. Everything makes sense.

Its interior design is minimalist, to say the least. It is a layout heavily influenced by Niles’ wife, Kay, and daughter Kim, who graduated from UCLA with a degree in interior design. The kitchen, from Germany, is of prefabricated aluminum. The living room also is minimalist, and for a reason.

"The thing here was to build a small, controlled environment so that the economics of it are in keeping with the whole family. I wouldn't call it communal, but it's that kind of an idea. The children and the grandchildren don't feel intimidated by coming up here. They don't feel like they're transgressing onto my wife and myself's property, or that they’re ‘going to Dad's cabin.’ It's really everybody's."

Niles is well aware of the criticism his cabin has drawn, but he said he has a long history with that kind of thing.

One particularly gnarly issue occurred some years ago in Vail, which had a strict design code that stipulated every new structure should somehow be Tyrolean.

"Everybody was up in arms over this very contemporary glass object -- a piece of jewelry sitting on the hill, because it wasn't Tyrolean," he said.

"We got into this giant battle. It was like the Frankenstein movie, with the people coming down the road with torches in their hands."

Niles paused, then smiled.

"Three years later," he said, "the house appeared on their Chamber of Commerce publication. That’s the way life is."

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