“They’re very nature-forward,” each with two walls of glass that will frame views of the the cove, the trees, the birds “and the occasional coyote,” Dalton said. The expanses of glass will also make the interiors of the buildings “not feel constrained, but open,” he said.
Dalton’s two cabins are the first to be shipped by Prefab Pads, a startup run by Hemang Mehta of Lake Forest and his son-in-law, Peter Seltenright, who lives in Chicago. Their firm is the North American licensee of a Latvian brand of prefab getaways called My-Cabin.
They are, essentially, tiny houses built for a luxury-minded buyer.
“You want to be in your own cabin in the woods or on a lake,” says Mehta, who sold a family plastics manufacturing firm and is funding the startup himself. “But you want a nice place, a modern place with good design.”
With black exteriors of wood siding and a metal roof and blonde-wood interiors with minimal details beyond bath and kitchen cabinets and the big windows on two walls, the buildings are a handsome modern version of rustic.
The overall look “creates an indoor-outdoor connection,” says Seltenright, who was in sales for an AI firm before launching Prefab Pads with his father-in-law. He compares the spare, modern style to Scandinavian design, something that’s “homey and comfortable, but not cluttered.”
