Picture the perfect cabin in the woods. Now imagine it’s all roof—one big triangle, 100 percent roof. That’s an A-frame, a building shape that always feels one step away from a fairy cottage. It’s made a comeback—if you could say it ever really went away.

Though what we know as the American A-frame dates to the twentieth century, the shape has deep roots, almost as far back as people have been making houses. Michael Houser, Washington’s official architectural historian, notes that you can see the form in early Polynesia and ancient Japan, and in early European houses. But the specific narrow, tall cabin we associate with the name was born in 1936 when architect Rudolph Schindler constructed a house in Lake Arrowhead, California; within a few decades, it launched a midcentury fad.

“They look like a cabin, they feel like a cabin—not like a regular house in the woods,” says Tom Feldman, whose vacation rentals near Stevens Pass have 133,000 Instagram followers. He credits the return of the midcentury modern aesthetic for his internet virality, so notable that Airbnb brought a camera crew to his Tye Haus to create a marketing video about leveraging social media for a rental.

Beyond being cute, the A-frame spread thanks to its simplicity in design and its low construction costs, says historian Houser. “Really two sides, no walls. The roof is the wall,” he says. The form boomed not only for woodsy getaways but for churches as well. Seattle-based Lindal Cedar Homes sold premade kits in the 1960s and 1970s, when the company’s design even graced the cover of Popular Mechanics. 

While the A-frame is not particularly distinct to the Pacific Northwest—many kit designers were in the Midwest, Houser notes—it did flourish here. David Hellyer, an Eatonville pediatrician who donated land that became wildlife park Northwest Trek, owned a few A-frames; his designs were so striking that the plans were shared by the Douglas Fir Plywood Association to promote the purchase of wood.

For all its charm, the A-frame is not without its quirks. That steep roof—the one that, in the manner of a Swiss chalet, keeps snow from accumulating—also means limited headroom on the second floor. Feldman had to keep to queen beds, not kings, in his rental sleeping lofts. And “everything is a 60-degree wall, essentially,” he says. “Standing a fridge up, putting in cabinets, closets, that’s all challenging. Everything has to be triangle-shaped.”

Still, the triangle is a hardy shape. When ice storms hit the Skykomish neighborhood that holds Feldman’s three rentals, the pointy tops proved ideal for withstanding the carnage. A 200-foot Douglas fir fell onto Tye Haus and “broke over the top of the triangle, essentially, without invading the inside space.” Turns out the A-frame gets A’s for form and function.

An A for Everyone

A-frame rentals across Washington.