Cabin Porn: Inside

Contributors

By Zach Klein

By Freda Moon

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Learn to make your own quiet place somewhere with this inspiring journey inside tranquil cabins and handmade homes, from the creators of the wildly popular Cabin Porn phenomenon.

Cabin Porn began as an online project created by a group of friends to inspire their own homebuilding. It has grown into a global phenomenon, attracting thousands of submissions from fellow cabin builders and a passionate audience of millions interested in simple, efficient homes and the beauty of nature.

Cabin Porn: Inside invites readers into these handmade homes to discover rooms of warmth and simplicity, connected by the universal desire to bring a simple building to life in harmony with the land around it. Each of these tranquil getaways is a lesson in living simply and joyfully.

Here you will find hundreds of examples of what makes a cabin: the small details that enable their dwellers to live pleasantly and sustainably, as well as the mistakes and adaptations that reveal what builders must learn while creating their own homes. Perhaps most touching is the evidence that these homes have hosted charming and memorable evenings for the people who worked together to build them.

Full of spellbinding spaces of warmth and ingenious simplicity, Cabin Porn: Inside is an invitation to the cabin of your dreams and to the serenity of a simpler life.


Excerpt

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COVER
Scott’s Cabin, a 300-square-foot structure at Beaver Brook in Barryville, New York.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY Noah Kalina




Places

Dozens of cabins, shelters, and retreats from all over the world are included in this volume.

Each is warm, simple, and made by a Cabin Porn reader like you.




Each one of us wants

to be able to bring a building

to life like this.

“It is a fundamental human instinct, as much a part of our desire as the desire for children. It is, quite simply, the desire to make a part of nature, to complete a world which is already made of mountains, streams, snowdrops, and stones, with something made by us, as much a part of nature, and a part of our immediate surroundings.”

—Christopher Alexander,
The Timeless Way of Building




Timber-frame porch under way at Beaver Brook.




Zach Klein and his family and friends spend a long weekend every year bucking logs to make a winter firewood supply.

PHOTO BY Wesley Verhoeve




Cornwall, England

Cornish Cabin

Contributed by Richard Stewart

Photographs by Richard Stewart, Alistair Sopp

The dramatic coastline of Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula, the southernmost place on the British mainland, features meadows and forests that extend right to the edge of the sea. For photographer Richard Stewart, it seemed like the ideal place to raise a family.

Richard was born in northern England and moved around constantly as a kid, uprooted by his dad’s corporate job. He wanted a more settled life for his own kids. “We wanted to bring our children up close to nature,” he says, “and in a small community where people would recognize them and know their name.” It didn’t hurt that the peninsula has clear, blue water where Richard, a surfer, could play in the waves.

When he and his then wife, Anna, bought seven acres of meadowland in Lizard, they didn’t initially plan to build a house. Richard and Anna were wildlife filmmakers who had met while on assignment, fellow travelers and adventurers who were comfortable in unconventional living situations. So they bought a Victorian-era train carriage—an ornate wooden train car that, Richard would later learn, was one of the oldest of its kind in the world. They placed the carriage at the edge of their meadow, where they lived and grew their family from one child to three, all girls: Lila, Sky, and Rilke.

The train car, with its vintage brass and wood fittings, was at once rustic and showy. Because it was an heirloom, its parts were expensive to replace. But it was a beautiful home in an enchanting corner of England, and Richard and Anna felt lucky to live there.




Large windows on the west-facing side allow sunlight to warm an internal log wall, which acts as thermal mass. The green roof insulates the cabin in both summer and winter.




The train car was a restoration of an 1865 Victorian wooden railway carriage. Richard and Anna spent a year living in the carriage before starting work on the cabin, which allowed them to study the movement of light and nature in the meadow.

The cabin is heated with a cast-iron wood stove during the Cornish winter.

As Richard describes it, Cornwall is both a magical and challenging place. It is a land of multimillion-dollar vacation homes, a place where getting permission to build a new single-family house is nearly impossible due to land-use laws. During the high season, the region is inundated with tourists and vacationers, and small villages swell to ten times their winter size.

In 2011, a Hollywood director saw a photograph of Richard and Anna’s train car and asked to buy it. The director wanted to use it as a studio for writing scripts. The couple had known that eventually they would need a bigger home, so they decided to sell. Richard found a loophole in Cornish law that would allow them to build, so he reached out to Håkan Strotz, a Swedish cabin builder known for his URNATUR eco-lodge. Richard had been impressed with Håkan’s environmentally friendly “hermitage”—cabins built on mossy boulders in the forests of Sweden—and hoped the man might offer advice on building a similar cabin in Cornwall.




The solid log internal wall, the wood stove, and the kitchen.

Håkan came to England to see Richard’s property for himself. In the summer of 2012, he spent a few days there, advising Richard and Anna on their plans and helping them source materials from around the property. That fall, the couple took their middle daughter, who had become enthralled in the project, out of school, and the family devoted themselves to the nearly year-long effort of building their home.

When it was time to start building, Håkan and a friend from Sweden returned and spent a month in Cornwall, helping the family to construct its cabin. Håkan helped fell trees and taught them traditional Swedish woodworking techniques. The girls were enthusiastic hosts who enjoyed taking a break from their studies to serve fika, the Swedish midday meal of coffee and sweet breads.

Richard and Anna’s vision was to build from, and reflect, the Cornish landscape. It’s a “very special natural location,” says Richard, describing the property’s placement next to the Helford River, one of the few places in England where forest goes right up to the seashore.

With Håkan’s help, the family felled a tree in a nearby valley and determined whether it could be shaped to fit the cabin’s design. Then the family handpicked another forty-eight trees from the woodland, which they felled over two days and hauled by tractor to the meadow, to be seasoned and shaped. (The cabin is the length of the shortest tree.)

The family also gathered sixteen granite boulders, along with stones from the nearby beach, to lay as the cabin’s foundation. Rot-resistant birch bark became a bed for the logs, which had been jointed and scribed. The family used winches, levers, and pulleys to put the logs in place; the ridge beam, which filled the gaps between them, required a crane. Each log was lined with sheep’s wool and held in place by giant pegs shaped on a draw horse by Lila and Sky. The roof was covered in turf dug from the meadow.

The sleep platform above the main living area, the distinctive roof structure, and the round ridge beam.

A painted yellow staircase reclaimed from a boat connects the cabin’s main living area to the sleeping platform above.

A bridge connects the main cabin to a smaller utility structure and a bathroom nestled at the edge of the woodland. The bridge is aligned with a glass windowed doorway that allows a view of the woods from the center of the main cabin.

While the cabin was being built, Anna and the girls slept at a rental nearby that the family were living in after they sold the train car, while building their own house. But Richard often camped in the unfinished building, which didn’t yet have windows or doors. He was accompanied by a family cat, two owls, and a fox that lived downstairs. The feeling of being connected to nature was something he sought to incorporate into the finished cabin. Richard says that he and Anna “wanted to make a home that always and constantly invited you outside.” Though they have a flush toilet, not an outhouse, they built their washroom in the woods and connected it to the main house with a bridge.




View of the shower. During the cabin’s construction, Richard and his daughters enjoyed washing under a hose attached to a tree in the woods. The bathroom’s design was inspired by that experience. The water drains through the floor into a hidden stainless steel trap. At night a clearing in the woodland outside this window is lit by string lights, which reflect on the windows and prevent the occupant from being seen without disturbing the feeling of showering in the forest.




The cabin was an intensely personal project. With the construction method that the family used, a notch runs the length of each log. In the Swedish tradition, “you’re supposed to put little talismans or gifts to the tree spirits” in the notches, explains Richard. “All sorts of stuff went into the actual walls of the cabin to give it a good spiritual blessing.” It’s like a “time machine,” he says.

After the cabin was completed, Richard and Anna lived there, on and off, for several years before deciding to sell it in 2014. When they put the house on the market, Richard left on a monthlong surf trip. When he returned, he was overwhelmed by the response. There were scores of cash offers to buy the home. But more gratifying were the people around the world reaching out to him, just as he’d reached out to Håkan, asking for advice about how to build a cabin of their own.




The cabin at night, facing west. A boardwalk through the meadow leads to the cabin’s front entrance while string lights illuminate a clearing in the woods.




Cuckoo’s Nest

Gjerstad, Norway

CONTRIBUTED BY Jens and Åse Trydal

Cuckoo’s Nest was inspired by a typical childhood fantasy—making a treehouse. Working with a local carpenter, its owners, Jens and Åse Trydal, took four months in 2016 to build the two-bedroom structure 20 feet off the ground in the treetops of Southern Norway. It is made of local wood, solar panels provide electricity, and it has a full kitchen with a refrigerator, a stove, and hot water.




My Bespoke Cabin

Brisbane, Australia

CONTRIBUTED BY Skye Kelly

Skye Kelly built her first dwelling as a way to cope with trauma. The 46-year-old mother of two found the process cathartic—a creative outlet she could pursue despite her modest means and a lack of formal construction and design training. She watched YouTube videos, searched the web, relied on her father for support, and scoured demolished buildings for materials. Among her finds were veranda boards from a century-old farmhouse in the Glasshouse Mountains, double doors from a Nundah State School, and vintage painters’ planks that she assembled into a kitchen bench. Kelly later built a second dwelling—a workshop/creative space nicknamed “The Chapel”—while her bespoke cabin has become a favorite destination for family campouts and film and photo shoots.




Viking Seaside Summer House

Fermanville, France

CONTRIBUTED BY FREAKS Architecture

PHOTOS BY Jules Couartou

This refurbished concrete fishing shack on France’s Cotentin Peninsula was originally built in the 1950s on a rock facing the sea. Its dimensions match Henry David Thoreau’s log cabin in Walden—10 feet by 15 feet—and France’s strict coastal regulations meant its size and shape couldn’t change during restoration. So FREAKS, a Paris architecture firm, did what it could, adding champagne-colored galvanized metal cladding as insulation and two large sliding windows that open onto the horizon. A double bed is in the mezzanine, a large outdoor terrace looks onto a pink granite landscape, and the lounge area has a table for eight, thanks to folding armchairs designed by Icelandic architect Valdimar Hadarson.




Westbrook Cabin

South-Central Kentucky

CONTRIBUTED BY Seth Spears

This five-year-old cabin was built in the remote woods of south-central Kentucky for hunting trips. Its owner, Seth, had always loved old Appalachian cabins, so when he decided to build Westbrook he relied on the style as a model. A grove of poplar trees on the property provided the wood. The logs were timbered and aged for 10 years, then cut to size with a portable sawmill; each log was notched with a chainsaw and stacked by hand. Seth kept the footprint small, with double lofts that sleep six on cots and a downstairs space that’s perfect for cooking, playing cards, and relaxing by the wood-burning cookstove.




Eyrie

Kaiwaka, New Zealand

CONTRIBUTED BY Cheshire Architects

PHOTOS BY Nathalie Krag

PRODUCTION BY Tami Christiansen

These twin cabins near Kaiwaka, in New Zealand’s Northland, are barely larger than four sheets of plywood. Entirely off-grid, they sit on a sea of rolling grass alongside an estuary, where they collect rainwater and use solar power. Built from fast-growing timber, without paint or polyurethanes, the design relies on oils and a charring process to seal the wood. Each cabin has a tiny kitchen, with a gas burner for cooking, and there’s an outdoor shower on a large boulder.




The Birdhut

Windermere, British Columbia

CONTRIBUTED BY Studio North

The Birdhut is a treetop perch on a forested hillside in British Columbia. Immersed in the canopy, the hut accommodates two people, twelve varieties of birds, and whatever inquisitive critters come by to visit. In addition to being an inviting place for people to nest, the whimsical façade has twelve birdhouses, each designed for various local birds that live in the mountains of the Columbia Valley.

The hut, which sits 9 feet above ground, is nestled in a cross-braced structure built of sturdy lodgepole pines foraged from a nearby forest recently ravaged by fire. The platform and cladding are made of planks reclaimed from an old cabin deck; the front façade is clad with western red cedar shingles cut with a custom rounded profile. The roof disappears with clear polycarbonate panels, allowing the sun to heat the hut; two circle windows ventilate it. A bridge connects the Birdhut to the hillside, and a stone path leads down to a natural spring and campfire.




Böseckhütte

Hohe Tauern, Austria

CONTRIBUTED BY DAV Mülheim

PHOTOS BY Felix Finger

Located 8,500 feet above sea level, the Böseckhütte Shelter is located on a high mountain trail in the Austrian Alps. It took 20 years to build—construction began in 1912—and it is as spartan as you’d think: there’s no oven and no water. It’s just four beds, a few blankets and candles, and the patter of mice.




The Rivers of North America

Shantyboat

Contributed by Wes Modes

Photographs by Wes Modes, Bredette Dyer, Jeremiah Daniels

At first glance, Wes Modes is an unlikely candidate for the role of modern-day hobo. For three-quarters of the year, the fifty-three-year-old is a university professor in Santa Cruz, an affluent California beach town, and charged with the weighty responsibility of shaping young minds. But when summer arrives, Wes travels to a major river—somewhere new each time—and drifts downstream for months in a rustic 10-by-8-foot floating cabin called a shantyboat.

The project is an homage to the historic American tradition of river dwellings built by poor people and migrant workers around the time of the second industrial revolution, from the 1850s to the 1950s. The floating shanties were constructed of whatever their builders could find or the waters delivered. It’s a tradition that has long since disappeared from American waterways, but Wes keeps it alive in homage to the history of the “river people” who made their lives aboard similar vessels. Wes’s shantyboat—named Dotty in honor of his grandmother, Dorothy—was completed in 2012, but it looks as though it has been “floating in a bayou for many, many decades,” he says with pride.

In recent years, Wes’s shantyboat has been towed behind a Ford F-250 truck along 26,000 miles of road and floated down 2,600 miles of river. With a rotating cast of crew members, Wes has explored the Sacramento, the Upper Mississippi, the Tennessee, and the Hudson Rivers. Next, he plans to navigate the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Louisville, six hundred miles downriver.




Genre:

  • "Takes us inside the world's coolest cabins... A testament to the human ability for creativity even in the most limiting of spaces."—The Daily Beast
  • "Invites readers into these labors of love in far-flung locales from Costa Rica to Belgium, as well as nearby gems."—New York Post
  • "Explore[s] every nook and cranny inside dreamy cabins around the world, from old-school rustic-chic interiors to super modern, minimalist ones."—Hunker
  • "A vision board for those who dreamt of getting away from it all and experiencing nature firsthand, preferably from a charming little cabin."—Apartment Therapy

On Sale
Oct 1, 2019
Page Count
336 pages
Publisher
Voracious
ISBN-13
9780316423090

Zach Klein

About the Author

Cabin Porn began as an online project created by a group of friends to inspire their own homebuilding. It has grown to attract thousands of submissions from fellow cabin builders and a passionate audience of millions interested in simple, efficient homes and the beauty of nature.

Zach Klein is an entrepreneur who co-founded and designed Vimeo, one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 20 million users. He is the CEO of DIY, a service to help kids learn any skill. He lives in San Francisco, and regularly travels to Beaver Brook. 

Learn more about this author

Freda Moon

About the Author

Cabin Porn began as an online project created by a group of friends to inspire their own homebuilding. It has grown to attract thousands of submissions from fellow cabin builders and a passionate audience of millions interested in simple, efficient homes and the beauty of nature.
 
Zach Klein is an entrepreneur who co-founded and designed Vimeo, one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 20 million users. He is the CEO of DIY, a service to help kids learn any skill. He lives in San Francisco, and regularly travels to Beaver Brook. 

Learn more about this author