If you are an architect with a minimalist approach, it may be hard to find clients equally obsessed with abstraction and austerity in materials and details. Yet Terence Riley, principal of the New York– and Miami–based firm K/R, recently designed a small one-story, one-bedroom cottage in Coconut Grove for someone who might be more minimally minded than he is. “I could live in a house and be completely satisfied if it were empty,” says the owner, Sonya DeLong, an American who spends part of the year in Switzerland, her husband’s native country. “I deliberately own very little.” Which is a good thing. Her new rectangular dwelling is 80 feet long and 20 feet wide. The attenuated 1,500-square-foot bar-like building sits within a 6,800-square-foot property roughly the shape of a triangle: at the narrow, western end is the entrance from the street, which leads into the living and dining area. At the opposite end is the bedroom, opening onto a verdant garden.

The elegantly proportioned plan allows the elongated south-facing wall of glass to open out to a perimeter walkway sheltered by the roof’s 6-foot cantilever. On the other side of the covered walk, a linear pool echoes the house’s proportions at a smaller scale. Demarcating the edge of the narrow path is a pebble-filled channel that captures rainwater from the canopy overhead.