There’s never been a better time to treat yourself to an off-grid trip, with beautiful new architect-designed retreats opening across the UK and Ireland. These five examples all offer a way to detox from the digital world and switch off in beautiful surroundings.
Architects Holiday, East Sussex
Co-founders of architecture practice Built Works and longtime friends Will Gowland and Harry Kay had a burning desire to build with their own hands. After finding the perfect location – Great Park Farm, a woodland with a natural swimming pond just over an hour’s drive from London – they founded Architects Holiday, a series of low-carbon retreats.
‘We have complete creative control, which is both liberating and terrifying,’ they say. They build every one of their cabins themselves, with each inspired by a specific ritual: cooking, bathing and, now, yoga. ‘The brief was deceptively simple – make a space where yoga, movement and quiet occupation are not an afterthought, but the primary architectural motivation,’ they say of their new Yogi’s Cabin. ‘Most of the hospitality industry treats wellness as an amenity. We wanted to invert that concept completely.’ The yoga studio is the very heart of the cabin, situated on the east-west axis so that early practices are bathed in morning sun and restorative sessions are lit by the warm evening light. The retreat’s large sliding doors open onto the 40-metre-long lake, which is ‘fed directly from a spring that comes straight out of the nearby hillside’.
‘What’s remarkable about this site is how much of the structure came from the land immediately surrounding it. The larch cladding was felled from the adjacent woodland less than a mile from the cabin and milled on site. The Douglas fir lining every interior surface came from woods less than two miles away. The thatch above the cladding was made from heather and silver-birch tips salvaged from fallen trees,’ explain Will and Harry. ‘The cabin grew out of its landscape.’
Inside, the approach is similarly local and personal. Harry’s wife Sarah (the founder of Common Objects) made many of the ceramics, while the bathroom tiles were handmade by his whole family, unglazed to reduce energy in production and sized to match the width of the timber wall panelling – his children’s fingerprints are still visible in the clay. Even the curtains were made by Harry’s mother-in-law and block-printed by him, with a pattern taken from the cabin’s floorplan. What hasn’t been handmade has been given careful thought. Expect Tekla bedding, towels and robes, Floks mattresses and top-quality yoga and meditation accessories from Yogi Bare and Yoga Matters. A thoughtful build located in the perfect spot for contemplation – ‘ancient, quiet and unspoilt’. From £320 per night, architects.holiday
Kabn, Loch Fyne
For Amber and Charlie Teale, founders of Kabn, the mission was ‘about creating a feeling’. ‘We wanted to design cabins that encourage people to pause and reconnect – with nature, with each other and with themselves.’ For their latest build, the dramatic scenery is that of Loch Fyne (another in the Cairngorms National Park is opening soon). ‘One of the things we loved about the site was its rawness and beauty. We wanted guests to feel immersed in the Scottish landscape without feeling exposed to it,’ say the duo, who worked with architect Paul Miller.
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‘Rather than imposing architecture onto the land, the aim is for the cabins to feel as though they belong there organically,’ they add. ‘Each one is bespoke, with orientation and layout carefully considered to maximise the views and light.’ Every detail inside has been chosen to feel elevated but understated: high-quality organic linens, tactile finishes, natural materials. ‘There’s a real sense of remoteness here, but also intimacy.’ From £510 for two nights, kabncompany.com
Samsú, County Westmeath
Rosanna Irwin had what she calls an ‘accidental digital detox’ in her late twenties, caused by a burnout-induced trip to Denmark and an internet-free stay on the small island of Samsø. Her stay convinced her to pack up her London flat, move home to Ireland and start ‘figuring out how to recreate that feeling for other people’.
She now has three cabins, with the latest, Cucu, designed with Studio Bucky – an architecture practice led by the Irish, New York-based architect Alexander Buckeridge. Drawing from the country’s vernacular architecture but ‘reinterpreted as something quietly bold’, the timber structure was built by Timberry, a local team, and the exterior is a defiant red – the same colour you see on old Irish farm-shed roofs. The palette is layered and tactile – plywood, terracotta tiles, copper detailing – and the land the cabin sits on was recently awarded organic-farm status. ‘There are walks in every direction, no road noise, no buildings in sight and only the birds for neighbours.’ From about £205 per night, samsu.ie
The Bide, Dorset
‘We view them as siblings,’ say Scott Lewis and Caroline Jenkinson of their first cabin The Bothy and this new creation The Nest. ‘It sits in a woodland clearing, surrounded by a canopy of trees that gives a much more intimate, sheltered feeling.’ Once again, the couple have done all the work themselves – Lewis is one half of architecture firm ReFrame Studio, while Jenkinson has a background in furniture-buying for Heal’s and The Conran Shop.
They have stuck to the same DNA (low-energy construction, designer touches and a large picture window), but for the new cabin’s cladding, the couple settled on CNC-cut plywood shingles stained a deep blue. This rich backdrop contrasts with the vibrant greens of the trees, drawing the eye outside and encouraging guests to try shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing. There’s the chance to partake in forest bathing of a more literal type, too – a deep outdoor bathtub can be found next to the sunken hammock on the patio. From £132 per night, thebide.com
Unyoked, North Yorkshire
This company, founded by brothers Cam and Chris Grant, has cabins all across the UK, as well as in New Zealand and Australia, but don’t let the size of the operation fool you; these are retreats built with care and intent. Its latest off-grid designs, created in collaboration with Forestry England, are located in a former Christmas-tree plantation near Scarborough.
‘It’s the base for an 8,500-acre forest that is designated as a Dark Sky Discovery Site,’ explains Cam. ‘On a clear night, you can spot the Milky Way with the naked eye. Most people have genuinely never seen that. It’s the kind of thing that recalibrates you.’ All of the cabins (there are currently five) are designed to sit lightly on the land: ‘There’s no mains water or gas and they are towed into place, which means no concrete and no excavation.’ Every material inside and out is designed to last, and working with Forestry England means Cam and Chris can give money back to the environments their cabins sit within, helping to protect the UK’s public forests. From £159 per night, unyoked.co
