Cabin Porn: Inside

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

Eyrie

Kaiwaka, New Zealand

The Birdhut

Windermere, British Columbia

Böseckhütte

Hohe Tauern, Austria

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.