Second Home, First Light

The first thing Soren Lindqvist did when he and Mara bought the property in 2017 was walk the eight acres for two days without a notebook. He is a retired architect. The notebook was a deliberate omission. "I have spent forty years drawing buildings before they were buildings," he said. "I wanted, for once, to not draw."

The cabin they eventually built, sixteen months later, sits on a south-facing rise about a mile from the nearest paved road, outside a small ranching town in southwest Montana. It is one room, technically two. The main room is sixteen feet by twenty-four feet, with a kitchen at one end and a stove at the other. The second room is the bedroom, separated by a single sliding pine door that Mara found in a salvage barn near Livingston and Soren refused to alter except for the latch. There is no second bathroom because they did not want a second bathroom.

Mara Lindqvist is a literary translator. She works in Korean and Spanish, primarily fiction. The cabin has a desk, built into the south wall, that Soren designed for her after watching her work for a week at the kitchen table during their first summer. The desk is white oak, twenty-eight inches deep, and faces a window that looks out at a draw where mule deer come through in the late afternoon. A blue-gray throw is folded over the chair. The translation she is working on now is a novella by a writer from Asunción.

The Lindqvists are sixty-five and sixty-three. Their two daughters, both in their late thirties, live in Seattle and Berlin. The cabin is not where the family gathers; that happens in the city. The cabin is where Soren and Mara go to be the people they were on weekends in 1986, when they were graduate students with no money and a borrowed tent. "We come here to be quiet at each other," Mara said, and laughed at herself, and then said, "no, that is true, that is the right phrase."

The kitchen is small on purpose. There is a four-burner gas range, an apron sink, a single open shelf with eleven bowls and twelve plates. The bowls were made by a potter in eastern Oregon. They are all slightly different. Mara matches them deliberately wrong when she sets the table. The morning ritual is coffee, brought from beans they grind by hand because the mill is loud and they like the slowness; toast, on a cast-iron pan that has been on this stove and the previous one for twenty-two years; and a soft-cooked egg, when there are eggs, from the rancher down the road who keeps eight chickens and brings them by every Tuesday.

There is a Welsh blanket on the bed that Mara's grandmother brought from Cardiff in 1957. There is a Saarinen tulip table in the main room, the only piece of furniture in the cabin that Soren admits he picked because he wanted it. There is a small Calder mobile, hung from the rafter near the kitchen window, that they bought as newlyweds and have moved seven times. The mobile is the first thing the morning sun hits.

What is striking about the Lindqvist cabin is not its design vocabulary, which is elegant and restrained and entirely consistent with the work Soren spent forty years doing. What is striking is the absence of any new project. Soren has not added on. He has not built a guest cabin. He has not put up the studio shed that he and Mara discussed for three months in 2020 and then quietly stopped discussing. "When the building is done, the building is done," he said, looking at the south wall in the late light. "I had to learn that. I am still learning it."

Mara walks every morning at sunrise, regardless of weather, regardless of season. She is back by seven. Soren has the second cup of coffee waiting. They do not talk about the day they are about to have. The day arrives anyway.