Cabin Porn

Images courtesy Little, Brown and Company and Cabin Porn

Tech entrepreneur Zach Klein's Cabin Porn (Little, Brown and Company) began as a Tumblr blog created by a group of friends to inspire their own homebuilding. As they collected more photos, other builders began to submit images of their own cabins, shacks, tipis, huts, prefabs, yurts, and sheds. The site also includes pictures of structures on his own property in upstate New York's rural Sullivan County.

Arctic Ocean near Senja Island, Norway.

For the book, Klein selected more than 200 shelters located in the U.S. and around the world from Cabin Porn's archives. While many follow in pioneer traditions of one- or two-room cabins of logs, stone, or milled wood conforming to regional styles and environment, there are also contemporary and sleek residences. They share a commonality of being based on sustainable design. 

His property is called Beaver Brook, named after the tributary that runs through it. It's a 55-acre woodland preserve in Barryville, about 100 miles northwest of NYC, that's grown into a community of like-minded people intent on developing their architectural and homesteading expertise. Residents opt for a spot in the bunkhouse or camp. There's an annual design-and-build workshop offered through their school and an artist residency. 

"I needed a remote piece of land where anything was possible," Klein writes. "I'd spent six years in the city building online communities and now I wanted to build one offline. Specifically, a place for a bunch of friends to be outdoors, somewhere we could be less preoccupied by our professions and more reliant on each other as we practice new skills together. I imagined a landscape nestled with shelters we would make ourselves without any previous experience. My search began in upstate New York. I was looking for a place where the locals wouldn't mind our experiments with architecture, assembling what would surely look like a commune. The property had a dirt road cutting through a stand of shagbark hickories, leading to a simple shed-style cabin with no electricity or plumbing that sat high above a brook feeding back down to the Delaware. Along the banks of this brook, century-old eastern white pines, known as the sequoias of the East, tiled at gravity-defying angles."

Cottage on an island near Nora, Sweden.

The Sunset House in West Virginia was built by artist/designer Lilah Horwitz and photographer/builder Nick Olson using recycled windows from garage sales, restoration places, and antique markets. The lumber was repurposed from a barn on the property. The owners say their home was designed to experience the changing light throughout the day in an interior space.

Lighthouse keeper's house in the Mokohinau Islands, New Zealand.

In addition to the photographs from the archives, there are ten cabin features with stories by Steven Leckart and photography by Noah Kalina. "How to Craft an Off-Grid Bunkhouse" profiles the Deer Isle Hostel, Deer Isle, Maine. The builders imitated the gabled dormers and overhanging second story of American colonial architecture, modeled on the Boardman House. It's a sustainable homestead with a dwelling large enough to accommodate several travelers. 

Yurt along the Silk Road, China. 

For those considering building their own small retreat, Cabin Porn empowers people to create more fulfilling places, based on simple construction with the primary focus on location and setting--whether in the mountains, woods, or by the sea. 

Ship cabin on the coast of British Columbia.

The shelters are divided into chapters including: backcountry, fixer-uppers, rustic, purpose-built, treehouses, modern, earthen, salvaged, and geometric. Many of the cabins were originally built as game lookouts, ranger houses, outposts, fishing and hunting cabins, and rustic observatories.

Beaver Brook bunkhouse.