The cabin's exterior shows the steeper slant of its new roof, meant to keep falling leaves from collecting. (Tony Soluri)

Chris Lonn quickly vetoed the idea of using a ladder to access the newly created loft that architects Greg Howe and Linda Searl proposed for his three-bedroom cottage, one of many vacation homes in the wooded enclave of Harbert, Mich., near the Lake Michigan shore. He wasn't getting any younger, Lonn, 63, explained to the architects at a meeting at his Chicago condo, plus he was tired of climbing on top of the house to remove the leaves and acorns that accumulated every autumn — just one of the many problems he wanted them to address.

"The roof had a bow in it that was reflected in the living room ceiling, and the place wasn't properly insulated, so we always had to shut it down around Thanksgiving," Lonn said. "It needed to be overhauled."

Lonn bought the '40s-era home with his partner and their two friends in 1974. Over the ensuing decades, they bought out their housemates and added two adjoining lots to create a 3/4-acre property. In 2008, after his partner died, Lonn approached Searl and Howe to help him redesign the dilapidated structure.

"Chris is a huge supporter of architecture and the concept that this house could be elevated to something better than it was, which was pretty mediocre," Howe said. "His vision from the get-go was that this was a simple house whose beauty was expressed by how it was built."

Other than the burnt-red window framing, which is a nod to the windows on the original home, the contemporary cottage they designed has little in common with the original structure.

The brick and stucco exterior has been replaced by new concrete block walls, and instead of shingles, the architects covered the roof with Galvalume, an aluminum-zinc alloy that reflects the sunlight and helps regulate the temperature inside. Its steeper peak sends water and debris into a moat surrounding the home that is filled with slag, an industrial byproduct sourced from nearby steel mills. As a result, the roof is virtually maintenance free.

"It's in the spirit of easy, passive things, which seems to be well aligned with the concept of a vacation house," Howe says.

The architects carried the Galvalume into the interior, where it has been used to create a cube that houses the master suite.

"We didn't want to add more to the palette than we really needed," Howe said.

The cube's metallic finish complements the stain that Howe mixed for the custom cabinets in the kitchen, which has been moved to a more central location between the living and dining areas, and the color of the new concrete floors. "There is a lot of gray, but it comes through in different textures and materials," Howe says.

Warming the cool concrete are radiant heat coils powered by geothermal wells behind the house. The floors continue onto the newly rebuilt front porch, which like the main living areas has a lofted ceiling with clerestory windows that draw hot air up and out during the warm summer months. "The temperature is five to ten degrees cooler than it would be without it," Howe says.

To justify the porch's prominent location at the front of the house, Howe designed it with aluminum commercial storefront window frames outfitted with screens in place of glass. Inexpensive floodlights illuminate the exposed building trusses, which are supported by steel tension rods. "The columns of the porch don't have a lot of mass, so the rods basically hold the roof structure from twisting and turning," Howe said.

Although the home is less than 2,000 square feet, the exposed framing creates a sense of openness that makes it seem bigger. "You can kind of chart the course of the sun through the day by the shadows and how things change inside," Howe said. "It's an easy place to daydream."

Opening up the interior also gave the architects enough headroom to create a lofted catwalk that overlooks the main living areas and is accessible via a stairway along one wall — a far more practical solution than the ladder the architects initially proposed. The catwalk leads to a window dormer, Lonn's idea, that's canted to face the lake. "I used to get up on the roof to rake off the leaves, so I knew I could see the lake from up there," Lonn said. "Now I go upstairs, and there's the lake. I don't have to get out on the roof anymore."

Lonn says that's one of the many benefits of the renovated cottage. "I remember what it used to be like to come out here and deal with all the issues at the old place," he said. "It's so nice now, and I don't have to worry about anything going wrong. There's nothing about this place that I don't like."

Looking for an elegant yet inexpensive solution for your home? Borrow one of the ideas in this cottage.

•For the cottage renovation, the architects selected simple, durable materials that look good without breaking the budget. "Chris was really looking for how design could solve simple problems in creative, beautiful ways," Howe said.

•Exposing building materials like the concrete slab, the ceiling rafters and the metal grating on the stair treads and catwalk created an industrial look at a lower cost. "Normally we do a lot of finishing work, but in this project, we just needed to get all the parts assembled correctly," said contractor, Jake Estkowski.

•Instead of using expensive pine boards for the ceiling, Estkowski created the illusion of planks by adding grooves to sheets of plywood. "The idea was to make it look rustic," Estkowski said.

•To illuminate the exposed trusses in the front porch, the architects incorporated inexpensive floodlight fixtures, continuing the theme of "using basic elements in interesting ways," Howe said.

•To create an elegant baseboard at a lower price, the architects used a simple aluminum strip bent into a 90-degree angle and screwed into the wall and floor.