Why designer cabins are springing up in a wood near you

When I start trying to count the woodpeckers, I realise I can’t remember the last time I had so little to do or think about. I can’t see the birds, as I sit alone beside the fire I’ve just made on the edge of a gorge in West Sussex. But I can hear at least four little beaks banging against ash trees.

My desk and young family are at home in London, less than 50 miles away. My phone is all but redundant without WiFi or reliable reception. I scroll instead through novel thoughts. Do the trunks that tower above me determine the varying depth of the percussion I can hear, or is it something to do with the birds? I’d google it if I could.

I am staying in a cabin in the woods in the South Downs National Park, where I have been promised an “ancient remedy for modern times”, away from the demands of city living. To the north-east, I can make out the Surrey Hills through branches waiting to burst into leaf. As an orange sun drops to the west, the woodpeckers, as well as the warblers, jays and chiffchaffs, start packing up their instruments.

My tiny house for two nights has been built by Unyoked, one of a thriving new clutch of wild-cabin start-ups that are wooing investors, landowners and stressed-out guests who want a slice of an Instagram-age wilderness dream. There are outsized windows, an on-trend birch plywood interior and a little wood-burning stove. Concessions to the great indoors include a fridge and crisp white linen.

Ever since Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, his account of life in the woods in Massachusetts, away from what constituted the rat race in 1845, we have fetishised versions of the cabin aesthetic. Today, social media and urban coffee tables are awash with #cabinlife imagery. Unyoked and its rivals set out to bring those photos to life, reimagining utilitarian shelters as accessible destinations for mindful retreat. And they’re growing fast.

In February this year, Unyoked, which was founded in Australia in 2016 by twin brothers Cam and Chris Grant, raised A$28mn (£15mn) investment to expand, mainly across Europe. It aims to go from 100 cabins to 1,000 in the next four years. In the UK, where Unyoked so far has 10 cabins, a workshop in Kent is knocking out three new ones per month.

A field guide offers tips for ‘dropping into an unyoked flow’ as well as a blank page for my own musings titled ‘Feels’

The company says it owes its success to a growing sense — heightened during the pandemic — that communing with nature might solve our work-life burnout woes. Its equally buoyant rivals include Getaway in the US, which started in 2015 and raised $41.7mn in a funding round in 2021. Raus in Germany and Unplugged in the UK both also launched in 2021, and now offer 34 and 17 cabins respectively. Estonian company ÖÖD Hötels was founded in 2018 and makes mirrored cabins that seem to vanish into the surrounding landscape; 41 are now available to rent from Mexico to Norway.

Many of these operations were conceived for like-minded souls by thirtysomething digital natives with stressful city jobs, and have common features: no WiFi as a virtue, Scandi-minimalist design, retro flourishes such as cassette tape players and enamel mugs. Their websites often appear to have taken their design cues from a Yellowstone National Park poster, circa 1975.

Many of the companies also share a similar business model — one that helps encourage the cabins’ rapid spread by minimising the investment needed from those on whose land the structures sit. Unyoked and Unplugged, for example, enter partnerships with farmers and other landowners, supplying them with cabins, taking the bookings and doing the marketing. The landowners get a cut of the rental income (15 per cent in the case of Unplugged; Unyoked prefers not to say) in exchange for hosting and housekeeping. Unyoked and Unplugged continue to own the cabins, which are built on trailer chassis like caravans, towed into place and given a deck and clever timber skirting to hide the wheels.

Others, including ÖÖD Hötels, offer a choice: landowners can buy the cabins themselves and pay a relatively low percentage of revenue to the company, or have the cabins supplied for free, in return for a higher cut.

The model has other advantages too. It is cheaper to build cabins in a workshop than on site. Installation can typically be completed in a single day. And, while planning rules vary between locations, permissions are usually easier to obtain for these moveable, temporary structures than conventional houses of the same size.

Unyoked has the added benefit of an unlikely Hollywood endorsement. In 2019, Matthew McConaughey summoned the Grant brothers to Los Angeles to co-design a cabin as part of a partnership with a bourbon brand the actor was promoting. McConaughey said he hoped the cabin, which now sits on the coast near Sydney, would “inspire Australians to reconnect with nature as an antidote to the frenetic pace of life”.

Maynard — the name of my cabin — is a couple of hours from London by car or train. I choose to enhance my own escape by making the longer journey by bike, and watch the suburbs give way to thatched roofs and woods bursting with bluebells.

Nonetheless, I arrive at Maynard with scepticism about the promise of wilderness less than 30 miles beyond London’s orbital motorway, the M25. The cabin sits on a 200-acre privately-owned estate, between the market towns of Petersfield and Midhurst, just south of the village of Milland, where I buy food at a charming community-owned shop that was opened by local resident, actor Hugh Bonneville.

A land of manicured village greens and houses with tennis courts doesn’t exactly feel like Yellowstone. The new #cabinlife experience, meanwhile, feels a bit try-hard at first. As well as mod cons such as running water, electricity, a composting toilet and a gas hob, I find in my cabin Unyoked-branded enamel bowls, a little shelf of nature books (Robert MacFarlane, mainly) and, on the tiny table for two, an old cassette player with a couple of Bowie tapes. A field guide offers tips for “dropping into an unyoked flow” as well as a blank page for my own musings titled “Feels”.

I consider myself, without pride, to be about as spiritual as a Pot Noodle. But I make a genuine effort, while I take my seat by the fire with a beer, to search for some sort of flow. Which is how I find myself counting woodpeckers, and contemplating the way thick moss ripples over the bark of the ash trees. I can see no other buildings, and the gorge below me is uncommonly quiet. Apart from the birdsong, I’m disturbed only by the occasional rustling of animals in last autumn’s leaves. I quickly lose track of time as an empty state of contentment washes over me. It’s a novel feeling. Perhaps this is working.

The Grant brothers, who are 36, enjoyed camping as kids, and travelled in their twenties, but then found themselves shackled to city desks. Cam remembers looking at “cabin porn” on his second screen. “I wanted to be in those photos,” he tells me before my retreat. The brothers began chatting to an architect friend and a builder. “Everyone had this itch to get closer to nature and all there was were farms where you’d be in some paddock without the immersion we wanted,” Cam adds. When the company opened its first two cabins outside Sydney, they were booked out within hours and demand keeps building.

Unplugged, whose cabins are all within two hours’ drive of London or Manchester, leans into the idea of a digital detox. In 2019, co-founder Hector Hughes sold a tech start-up, only to burn out so hard he had to recover with a 10-day silent retreat in Nepal. His new company encourages guests to lock their phones in a box and seal the key in an envelope. Hughes says most people leave them alone. Many are the employees of companies that have started to offer off-grid escapes as an annual perk. “There’s a stigma around retreats and meditation, but so much of the benefit is just getting people offline and into nature,” Hughes says.

The “cabincore” aesthetic is also rippling throughout the more established hospitality industry, as expensive cabin rooms pop up in the grounds of smart hotels (shepherd’s huts are now passé). Last summer, Nathan Aylott, who runs a hotel interiors and branding studio, co-founded Nokken, a separate company, to make luxury modular cabins. Some are being installed in groups, albeit separated by woodland to give privacy, in a smaller-scale, more upmarket take on the caravan park. “We’ll probably see a lot of these cabin resorts bloom out of nowhere,” he says.

At Koto Design in Devon, co-founder Zoe Little was inspired after living in Oslo, where many residents keep a modest rural cabin. A handful of spacious Koto “cabin retreats” have joined the lodges in the woods at the Fritton Lake resort in Norfolk, while 17 cabins are due to start opening this summer at The Point at Polzeath in Cornwall.

Maynard is one of three Unyoked cabins in the South Downs woods, but they’re generously spaced and out of sight of each other. I feel entirely alone — in a nice way — as I bed down under a heavy duvet after a fireside dinner. I decide not to draw the blinds over the giant windows to my left and at my feet. As I fall asleep, I watch stars through silhouetted tree branches swaying gently in a breeze.

Confident that I’m at my most mindful when my heart is racing at double speed, I ride south after breakfast to meet the South Downs Way, a hilly trail that winds for more than 100 miles across southern England, past Iron Age hill forts and ancient grazing lands. The breeze has stiffened considerably, so I blow with it to the cathedral city of Winchester, at the western end of the trail. It’s a glorious ride, through beech woods and over hills as green as the fairways at Augusta. After a rain-soaked return by road, I’m grateful for my cabin’s hot shower.

With a few hours left of daylight, I put on my hiking shoes and drop down a steep path to the sun-dappled Hammer Stream. I’m almost surprised to spot two other people. It turns out that Fee Hudson Francis, 27, and Matthew Bartram, 35, are staying in one of the other cabins. The couple, who have stressful jobs in the arts and live in Southampton, had spotted Unyoked on Instagram. They have not left the woods. “It’s felt like a real opportunity to go away but not feel forced to do stuff, to actually switch off and rest,” Hudson Francis says.

I head downstream, along a footpath into Hammer Wood, a 150-acre estate around a dammed pond that belongs to a nearby Buddhist monastery. Walking around the water as an egret takes flight, I have a brief encounter with an Italian monk, who wears hiking boots and an orange puffer jacket over his saffron robes.

He has just left a kuti, or meditation hut, and looks slightly confused when I say I’m staying in a new cabin on the other side of the stream. I feel like a relative fraud of self-reflection in his company. But, as I hike back up to Maynard to enjoy a second night of silent solitude before I pedal back to London, I wonder if we have found in these enchanting woods versions of something similar.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter

Letter in response to this article:

Back-to-nature holidays are not for everyone / From Gussy Alamein, Eccles-on-Sea, Norfolk, UK