Cabin Porn

When I finally got around to opening Cabin Porn yesterday evening on another exotic living space binge brought on starting Friday afternoon with Ben Brooks’s article Fatal Design Flaw of the Workspaces, I was excited. Posts like The World’s Skinniest House and Tiny Houses over on Huckberry — both linked to in Ben’s article — had rekindled a long-extinguished flame somewhere inside of me, igniting that visceral desire to discover something new and interesting. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order. I would be the happiest man in the world to have any one of these amazing cabins.

• Off-grid Farmhouse. There’s just something about a wide open field of tall prairie grass waving in the gentle summer breeze that has always appealed to me. Every time I watch Dances with Wolves I envy First Lieutenant John Dunbar as he walks through waist-high grass on those warm summer days, left with nothing to do but write in his journal.
• Sod-roofed Hut. I love the sharp rise and fall of a mountain range, the majesty of the land soaring high in the sky, just as much as a seemingly infinite prairie. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to step outside and see this view every day.
• Treehouse. Nobody loves a nice forest as much as I do. There’s just something about knowing that I could walk for an entire day in any direction and still never meet another human that taps in to some base human desire to be alone, and to be alone in nature.
• A-frame. A dash of compromise: some woods, a few small hills, and an empty plain.
• Handbuilt. Many of the cabins featured on Cabin Porn are hand built. Ah, to build such a thing as Hunter/grower/gatherer/blogger Rohan Anderson built a log cabin smokehouse with his own two hands.
• Mueller Hut. Once before in my life have I seen a view such as that depicted in the first photo, when I was traveling in South Africa. One of my favorite memories of my trip there.
• Floating Cabin. As soon as I saw this cabin I immediately thought of a summer long ago spent at a friend’s cabin in the North Woods of Minnesota. A trip I will never forget.
• Island Cabin. I’ve only been on an actual island a handful of times in my entire life. My earliest memory of such begins with a boat ride out to Put-in Bay; the last of a chilly night spent fishing and huddled around a campfire in the woods of West Virginia with a group of close friends.

This site is not merely interesting because we get to see cool little houses built in interesting places. No, it’s interesting because it serves as a window into an ideology, another way of life — a different world view. Featuring books like Handtools: Their Ways and Workings, The Poetics of Space, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, Living the Good Life, We Were an Island, and The Self-Sufficient Life to name just a few, Cabin Porn promotes such an admirable way of life we could all benefit from striving for.

And this is all just from the first ten pages, not even a fifth of the site.