You could call it a cabin, but ...

YVONNE NEUMANN has trouble putting a name to her 880-square-foot home overlooking Lake Isabella.

You could call it a cabin. It’s small -- only one bedroom with a loft. It’s secluded -- perched on the top of a rocky hill overlooking the lake’s shimmering waters. And it’s cozy -- it has a wood-burning stove and picturesque views of the lake and the surrounding hills. After all, Neumann and her architect husband, Andy, only use it for the occasional weekend getaway.

But with its stylish tongue-and-groove wood plank ceiling, fire-resistant metal roofing and centralized air-conditioning, the Neumanns’ retreat is too modern and elegant to fit the old definition of a cabin.

At the Neumanns’ cabin, you won’t find creaky plank floors and sinking wood porches. The place is energy efficient, low maintenance and built to blend into the landscape. It also has motorized aluminum shutters that roll over the windows, making it as secure as a bank vault.

“To me, it’s a kind of reinterpretation of a cabin,” Andy Neumann says.

To the Americans of the Old West, cabins were simple, humble structures that offered the barest of shelter. Aesthetics, energy efficiency and security were not big concerns. The idea was to throw together something cheap that would block out the elements. Later on, cabins became places to lay down a bedroll before hiking out to the real destination: a trout-filled stream, a mountain lake or a shady forest.

The Neumanns’ retreat embodies the state of modern cabins. Today’s cabins are cozy and comfortable, like the cabins of old. But the look is clean, stylish and innovative. Stucco walls, polished concrete floors and metal roofs have replaced splintered wood and redwood shingles. Double-glazed glass and photovoltaic panels have taken the place of drafty windows and leaking roofs.

And now cabins are designed by many of the same architects who sketch plans for luxury hotels, government buildings and cathedrals. Among the handful of architects who specialize in cabins are Mary Griffin, a partner at the Berkeley architectural firm Turnbull Griffin Haesloop.

“Today it’s about pleasure,” she says of modern cabins. “It’s not about basic shelter.”

For such architects, cabins offer a unique set of challenges and advantages. One advantage is that cabins have no need for huge closets and giant storage space. The kitchens are smaller too because, well, who wants to prepare elaborate meals or host big dinner parties in a quiet retreat?

Still, cabins are usually two to three times smaller than a typical home and that means cabin architects must make the most of the remaining living space. As a result, cabin designers might build a living room that doubles as a dining room, put a shower outdoors or tuck a kitchen under a staircase. They must also incorporate the cabin’s features into the surrounding landscape.

“Often it’s like designing a big boat,” says Griffin. “You really think about using each piece and not having a lot of excess space.”

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OVER 40 years ago, Yvonne Neumann’s mother and uncle bought 30 acres of rocky scrubland on the hills overlooking Lake Isabella, a reservoir on the Kern River, about 42 miles northeast of Bakersfield. They bought the land cheap, thinking it would quickly grow in value, making for a good investment. Later, they sold some of it and parceled out the rest to family members. Yvonne, who lives about 180 miles away in Summerland, got a lot on the precipice of a rocky hill.

Her architect husband, a former champion surfer, had already designed and built a cabin in a canyon outside of Gaviota that he called his “surf shack.” But Yvonne felt a connection with the desert landscape around Lake Isabella. She convinced her husband to design a second cabin overlooking the lake.

“I love the stark beauty of the place,” she says as she gives a tour of the cabin on a warm weekday morning. Outside, heat waves rise from the pavement, but inside, the cabin is cool and comfortable.

Before Andy put a mark on paper, he visited the parcel, set the views to memory and talked to his wife about the features they wanted for the getaway cabin.

“The siting is very important,” says Andy, a partner at the Carpinteria architectural firm Neumann Mendro Andrulaitis. “We like designing without having a preconceived notion.”

The couple -- in their mid-50s at the time -- dubbed the split-level cabin Casa Bella and completed it in 2000. It’s in Wofford Heights, a town with a couple of traffic lights and strip malls, a place the Neumanns rarely venture. With a getaway like theirs, why should they?

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AT the end of a washboard dirt road, surrounded by yucca plants, juniper trees and wild buckwheat, the Neumanns’ cabin sits low on the hill top like a sports car in the weeds.

The look is no accident.

The Neumanns sunk the foundation several feet into the rock and built the roofline to follow the incline of the hill to make the cabin fuse with the landscape. The low profile cuts down on the gusting wind blowing off the lake and keeps the cabin from drawing too much attention to itself.

Blending into the land was important, so the Neumanns left untouched all the native plants, trees and grasses surrounding the property. There is no garden or lawn to tend when the cabin is locked up for long periods.

Originally, the Neumanns planned to paint the thick stucco walls an earthy color, like the faux adobe buildings in Santa Fe. But when they caught a glimpse of the unfinished structure wrapped in black building paper, they decided to stick with dark colors. Surprisingly, the effect -- dark grey stucco with a black roof -- contributes to the camouflage. The black and grey colors mimic the surrounding granite boulders.

It’s a common technique with modern cabins.

“We try melding [the cabins] to the land,” says Seattle architect David Vandervort, who also specializes in cabins. “We look for found potential in the land.”

Take, for example, a rustic cabin Vandervort designed on San Juan Island, north of Seattle. Vandervort used reconditioned lumber and rusty corrugated metal to give the cabin the look of a weathered fire lookout. But steel rebar has been drilled into the rocks below, reinforcing the structure’s sonotube concrete piers to give the cabin extra stability.

Another popular technique for making cabins blend into the landscape, says Vandervort, is to break up the rooms into separate structures connected by footpaths, patios and gardens.

“We try to be sensitive to scale,” he says. “If it has to be larger, we break it into smaller pieces.”

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FROM the outside, the windows in the Neumanns’ cabin seem out of balance and oddly shaped. That is until you look out of them from the inside.

Two long, rectangular windows are cut into the living room wall, set at eye level when you sit on a chair or lie on the twin-size daybeds. Because the cabin is sunk into the hill, the windows are at the same height as the desert landscape outside. Yvonne and Andy Neumann often sit and watch the daily passing of lizards, snakes and spiders through these windows.

“It’s like every window is a picture,” Yvonne says.

In the cabins of the Old West, windows were small because glass was expensive and allowed heat to escape. But today’s glass is stronger and double-glazed, allowing architects to install entire walls of glass to frame distant mountains, lakes and trees.

But windows that let in too much sun can be a problem, particularly at Lake Isabella, where summer temperatures can soar to 110 degrees. With that in mind, the Neumanns built 2-foot-thick walls that keep the place cool during those blistering summer days. The windows are also set in about 6 inches from the exterior walls, which block the direct sunlight like a permanent awning

To make the place fire resistant, the Neumanns installed a metal roof with no overhangs to catch burning embers.

The thick stucco walls also house a unique security feature: black aluminum rollup shutters. The metal shutters roll down with a flick of a switch inside. The shutters perform two functions: They keep the isolated cabin secure when it is unoccupied and block out the scorching heat from the sun, keeping the cabin extra cool. The cabin has a centralized air-conditioning system but the thick walls and rollup shutters reduce the need to run it even on the hottest days.

Architect David Wright of Grass Valley has come up with a similar idea for extra cabin security.

He designed a 980-square-foot cabin near Nevada City in the Sierra Nevada that is “off the grid,” thanks to photovoltaic panels that store electricity in a series of heavy-duty batteries and a propane tank that powers the stove, refrigerator and a pump. On the first floor, he added metal panels that slide on barn-door tracks over the windows and doors.

“It’s no longer a cabin shack,” he says of today’s cabins. “It’s designed to last for generations.”

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INSIDE the Neumanns’ cabin, the feeling is relaxed and comfortable. It’s a place where the couple can escape with a good book or a DVD for a weekend. Two well-worn leather chairs face a cast iron wood-burning stove. The dining room table, which seats six, is only a few feet away. The kitchen is small. A stove top and a sink are embedded into a polished, low-maintenance concrete counter top with a small refrigerator underneath.

The bedroom is only about 100 square feet with a tiny adjacent closet. A small loft off the living room is just the right size for visiting children.

But when the Neumanns entertain family or guests, the party is often on the covered outdoor patios that face the 11,200 acres of glistening water. Combined, the two patios provide 280 square feet of extra living space. One patio faces the lake while the other is turned toward the north and protected from gusting winds off the water.

And when they want to soak up some sun and look for adventure, they hike the rugged hills that surround the cabin or swim in the lake. An outdoor shower comes in handy to clean up afterward.

“It’s a great place to work,” says Andy. “There is a sense of liberty and freedom here.”

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hugo.martin@latimes.com

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Hideaways in reach

Despite their size, building a cabin can be surprisingly pricey -- on the most basic level. After all, it’s not easy dragging phone service, electricity, water, sewage to a secluded canyon or to a remote mountaintop. But there are alternatives to high-price architects and backcountry builders.

Office of Mobile Design in Venice, Calif., headed by designer Jennifer Siegal, assembles prefab homes of glass, steel and other sustainable materials, perfect for urban artist types and can double as cabins. The cost: about $150,000 for a 700-square-foot home with foundation. www.designmobile.com

Sherpa Cabins Inc. in Thompson Falls, Mont., builds prefabricated cabins that they truck to your site for about $43,000 plus delivery costs. A 14-by-26-foot cedar home features a full bath and appliances. It can sit on blocks, but a concrete foundation is recommended. www.sherpacabins.com

Feel like putting together your dream cabin yourself? Companies such as Cabin Kit Homes of Greer, Ariz., can sell you the plans and materials to build a 720-square-foot cabin for about $30,000. Plumbing, electrical and cabinets are extra. www.cabinkit.com

And for do-it-yourselfers, there’s always the log cabin kit. Blueprints sell at Internet sites for as little as $25. Cabins of about 144 square feet include a single room, a kitchen and bathroom and a small loft. The materials -- logs, bolts, nails, windows and doors -- sell for as little as $12,000.

-- Hugo Martin