Lose yourself from

the comfort of your armchair or sofa with the best cabin designs from The

Modern House’s archive of past sales and Journal features. Dream of hiding out

deep in the Cornish countryside or finding solitude in a quiet cabin on the

          A Scottish Bolthole on Skye

Ok, so this is more house than cabin, but it’s a sense of adventure and the beauty of the wilderness that are the important considerations here, not how many bathrooms there are. And wilderness there is. The backdrop is Loch Eishort on the southern end of the Isle of Skye, where the area’s native woodland and the jagged peaks of the Cullin mountains is known as the Sleat: the garden of Skye.

Little distracts from views of the landscape inside, with large picture windows framing the dramatic scenes outside. In the downstairs open-plan living space, prized positions are in front of the roaring stove and facing out – book in hand, blanket at the ready, wine poured: we can think of nowhere we’d rather hunker down.

          Marcia Mihotich’s Summer House by the Sea

“It’s a simple space but it’s the most amazing privilege to have a house on the beach. We’ve done as much as we can to make it nice, but we don’t want to be too precious about it,” said London-based graphic designer Marcia Mihotch when we visited her cabin on the beach near Whistable for our My Modern House series. We were taken by her no-thrills approach, the spirit of good cabin design in our opinion: enough to be comfortable, but not enough to distract from the more important things; a book, a long lunch with friends or simply observing the changing weather from a deck chair, pebbles underfoot, as the tide comes in.

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          A Wooden Interior on the Thames

With a traditional cast iron stove and wooden floors, walls, ceilings and shutters, there’s something of the American frontier cabin vernacular to this home on the traffic-free island of Wheatley’s Eyot in Surrey, on the banks of the River Thames.

Any old-world feel is strictly cosmetic, though: the house was completed in 2015 to a design that favoured energy-efficient solutions, like the wood-fuelled boiler, which is topped up with fuel that is charmingly delivered by boat. But boating around soon becomes the norm here, with the house’s last owners zipping to restaurants, pubs, shops and visits to friend’s houses all via a small motorboat. Back at home, a south-facing waterfront deck is a perfect place to open a beer come late afternoon.

          A Disappearing Studio  

‘The tall living room opens onto the marsh and a south-facing courtyard. In the summer, it is possible to open up the large sliding doors and thus to inhabit the house and the garden like a sort of extended camp,’ explains Lynch Architects, the studio behind Marsh View, a truly original addition to Britain’s country house tradition on the marshes of North Norfolk.

The camp-like complex includes a mirror-clad studio that fades into the surrounding landscape by reflecting it. Yet inside the views are embraced with a panoramic window overlooking the fresh and seawater marshes, while a desk parked in prime position makes for the writing studio of dreams.

          A Riverside Retreat in Cornwall

When you think of a cabin in the woods, does something that resembles this in almost every way come to mind? Us too. This is the cabin of the imagination: a Douglas Fir-formed structure in the middle of seven acres of meadows and woodland, set halfway into the trees and whose only heating element is a wood-burning stove – there’s a wood store outside, and you’ll have to roll up those sleeves if you want to stay warm in winter. The off-grid dream is topped off by a wild meadow roof, which helps keep the cabin warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

We’re dreaming of a day spent fishing for mackerel on the nearby Helford River, an estuary on Cornwall’s south coast, and evenings spent with friends around a fire, under the stars, with the day’s catch cooking away. Come morning, the shower with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the woods will be a glorious start to the day.