CabinPorn
McMansions used to be one supersize symbol of the American dream, but these days many of our country’s most celebrated businesspeople see success more diminutively: in the form of a cabin. Preferably one on the smaller side, made of recycled wood, as technology-free as possible. Ironically, many of the cabin’s great champions are tech giants.
One such champion is Zach Klein, co-founder of Vimeo, whose Cabin Porn Tumblr blog garnered enough followers to warrant a book of the same name, one The New York Times has been musing over.
“The cabin and the shack are ideal launchpads for remarkable lives but lately they’ve become homes to aspire to—particularly for overburdened types whose acquisitive binging has made them want to purge,” the Times noted.
Think of these simple spaces as an architectural panacea. “Driven mad by status anxiety? Addled by technology? Bankrupted by consumerism? Then shrink your footprint. Go minimalist. Get free,” the Times said.
Rest assured, these aren’t a homespun-looking pile of logs. Cabins have captured the interest and imagination of designers and architects who can make them stark or sweet, high-design or homey (or both!). And they can mesh high ideals with low costs (or not—cabins can be plenty luxurious).
What inspired Klein’s cabin passion? His desire to transfer all that online-community building to the offline world. As he wrote in his book’s introduction, he wanted “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.’’ Maybe that’ll be the next thing in cabin-mania: miniature communes of high-design cabins, colonies of “he sheds” and “she sheds.”
For now, even those of us not ready to head back to the land can continue to peruse the aspirational Cabin Porn. And when we make enough money, we can ditch the McMansion fantasy for the cabin dream.
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