Another book that I found by walking along the shelves of the House & Home section, running my fingers along the bottom of the books, looking for the Taunton “T” logo.
I dream of a cabin, on a granite cliff, overlooking a lake, a steep-roofed cabin with a fireplace at one tall end, framed by windows, window-seats, and bookshelves. With half-bookshelves running along the side walls, with windows above, and the opposite gable leading past a long dining table, out to a deck overlooking the water, and a kitchen off to the side, and a cozy bedroom above the kitchen with a bathtub also overlooking the lake.
They used to call it Shelter Porn. Sitting in your tiny post-war apartment, enclosed by concrete, listening to sirens outside your window, and fantasizing about a “site […] chosen for its natural beauty”, a “simple, basic shelter [that…] doesn’t try to make a social statement” where “overlapping activities take place within the compact quarters” and “everybody feels at home right away.”
Oh god I’m listening to the ABC debate and am ready to run for a cabin right f*g now.1
This book is beautiful. It starts with a log cabin.2 And then, after variations on other cabins, it continues with the kind of cabins that you find at a camp, with wide, windowed porches, and high-pitched attic bedrooms. Rustic cabins with arched doors to shaded sleeping porches. Prairie cabins, tobacco barns, cape cods with widows walks, ghost town cabins, modern cabins, seaside farm cabins on Whidbey Islands (where I lived as a child).
When you’re feeling stressed (and I am feeling a little stressed tonight for some reason), I crave a cabin, a tiny space, connected to nature.
Oh god, I have to stop now. I can’t keep listening to this. I have to go to bed.
And dream of cabins.
Far, far away.
Far.
Away.
Far.
Change+Management 