The 'cabin phenomenon' or why everyone wants to live in a cabin

With nearly four million

on Instagram alone, and over a billion views on TikTok, it's no wonder this phenomenon is one of the internet's top obsessions.

But, let us start at the beginning.

Since the Stone Age, cabins have been part of the history of mankind;

it is the most primitive and essential facet of the human being, connecting him with nature and the earth.

In the 1st century, Vitruvius, Julius Caesar's architect during the Roman Empire and author of the oldest architectural treatise known, introduced the concept that exists today of the cabin, defining the refuge in nature to disconnect.

Henry David Thoreau, back in the 19th century, has made everyone yearn to have a Walden experience once in a lifetime ever since.

Escape from the routine or the city and connect the loneliness of man with the forest: that is the key.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately;

just face the facts of life and see if I could learn what she had to teach,” he would write in his diary.

They have been a myth in literature and art, extolling the idea of ​​the writer's cabin, that little refuge where ink can be unleashed.

Many of the great works of Thoreau himself, Gustav Mahler or Virginia Woolf were written in farmhouses or wooden shelters.

More information

Glamping, cool cabins and bubble hotels: other ways to sleep outdoors

In

, Eduardo Outeiro Herreño (Luis Seoane Foundation, 2011) and several authors reflect on the relationship between intimacy, creativity and the natural spaces of writers, musicians or architects throughout history.

It has also been a challenge for architects such as Le Corbusier, who in the fifties of the last century conceived

, his small palace on the French coast, as he called it —today one of his projects recognized by the Unesco.

But it is with the birth of the internet that the cabins become a symbol of aspiration for most of those who live between cement and asphalt.

Cabin Porn, the Bible

In 2009, the year of the social media

, when WhatsApp was a technological baby and Instagram did not yet exist, it was Facebook and MySpace that dominated digital conversations and Tumblr was establishing itself as the main

platform .

And right there, in that breeding ground before

and

Zach Klein, CEO of Dwell and co-founder of Vimeo, decided to create a space for one of his greatest passions: cabins in the woods.

This is how Cabin Porn was born, the precedent of the cabin movement on the Net and the main culprit behind the obsession with small wooden houses.

With more than 10 million visits to its website per month, it began a revolution that today floods the Internet, virtually disconnecting while

, wishing to be in a wooden house from the other side of the screen.

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In 2016, Cabin Porn made the leap to the publishing world and published its first book, curated by Klein and selecting the best of the best from more than 12,000 cabins that filled the web at the time.

In 2019, they released

, a second volume dedicated to interior design and consolidating the movement beyond the internet.

From Taschen to Gestalten, major publishers have turned this phenomenon into a bestseller, being part of the most

shelves in the world.

Around this euphoria, applications like Nosili or CampNight have been born that want to transform our productivity and sleep by simulating life in the heart of the forest.

Projects like The Cabin Club or The Cabin Land also explore that territory from a more traveler-focused, lifestyle-focused point of view.

Even in fashion and decoration, where the famous

or

have found a niche, creating an aesthetic and a visual style around the rural world that idealizes country life.

Flee the city after the pandemic

But if the internet has been fascinated with cabins for more than 10 years, why are we now obsessed with living in one?

“During the lockdown, people stopped and then we had a moment to think.

We live full of mechanized habits and in a society of rules”, says psychologist Ruth Zazo.

“When we stopped, we began to consider what to do with our lives and to realize that we had to get out of the routine and the norm.

We adapt to a change of scenery and we begin to have a different concept of housing”, she continues, “we want to enjoy and the space in which we live acquires a sense of pleasure that did not exist before”.

After the 2020 lockdown, searches for cabins, log home rentals, and manufactured home construction tripled from previous years.

Suddenly, something had changed: the pandemic took the world out of the productive and stressful loop it was in, and fueled the desire to drop everything and go back to the field.

Cities like Madrid or Barcelona have been losing inhabitants in the last three years.

The materialization of that aspiration of the cabin becomes more tangible with the exodus from the city that has been leading the search for open spaces connected to nature.

However, this movement has nothing to do with the Great Resignation or Great Resignation, although that flight from the cities looks like it, and which has caused an avalanche of workers in the United States to leave their jobs.

It is a much more internal and intimate attachment, a return to the roots that hits the reset button to make people aware of what is around them.

“The pandemic has taught us that we can live better, that we can take control of our lives,” says Zazo, who assures that now “small houses do not make sense, and teleworking allows us to live in friendlier areas, with more freedom. and oxygen”.

Living in the territory of FOMO (

, the fear of missing something) and of exposing lives on Instagram without any limitation, it is time to connect with nature and forget the imposed productivity that often turns people into in machines.

Ultimately , the

phenomenon is nothing more than the awareness of returning to the beginning, resuming the quiet life of our ancestors.

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But long before the pandemic and that reconciliation with nature, after months locked up within four walls, the Getaway website was born in 2015, with the thought of meeting in balance with the environment when going on vacation.

Getaways two hours from any city that sought to recharge their batteries and reconnect with the sound of the wild, at a time when cities were growing more and more and the countryside was emptying.

More recently, Airbnb, echoing the new trends in travel around the world after confinement, has redesigned the entire experience of its vacation rentals, giving greater visibility to accommodation of this type with its curator of unique spaces.

Tree houses in Italy

Alpine chalets in Switzerland or rustic cabins in Finland miles away from cities are some of the examples that this is a business in full expansion and that, in reality, it has only just begun.

That is why, as Henry David Thoreau said, you have to go to the forest to live deliberately because you did not want to live what was not life.