Nick Olson and Lilah Horwitz quit their jobs and set off to build a glass cabin in the mountains of West Virginia. Nick is a photographer who specializes in tintypes taken with a camera he made himself. He currently works for a landscape company in Milwaukee designing one-of-a-kind objects and spends his off time travelling the country looking for adventure. Lilah is a designer. She has made several clothing lines, each one coinciding with the a city/place she inhabits.
She currently sells her work in New York boutiques and also works for a landscaping company in Milwaukee Wisconsin. 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. ( Filmed by Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long; interviewed by Jordan Wayne Long ; music and editing by Matt Glass )