The 8 most remote houses, cottages & cabins featured in House & Garden
It can feel, in the day and age of connection, as though the truly remote is gone forever. That the internet and mobile phones have forever dispelled any feeling of true isolation just as handily as plane, the train and the car almost did before them, and that there’s nowhere left to run when busy-ness becomes too loud, and modernity’s tax really begins to bite into your ability to stay calm.
But not so – there are still some corners of the planet which remain out of reach of most, or which at least have escaped the worst heat of attention. Perched on the edges of islands and lochs, sequestered among dark, creaking forests or hammered into the rock high up on wind-bitten mountainsides, these places and the houses, cabins and cottages that have been built on them seem purposely designed as retreats from the world. Their owners and designers are varied in everything except for one mission: to find peace, quiet, space and beauty, and not to have to share it with too many others. And who can blame them?
We plundered the archive for some of the most remote and isolated places we’ve ever featured in House & Garden, from the rugged valleys of Colorado to the salty sea lochs of Scotland.
Owen Gale1/8After a long period searching, and a self-imposed set of parameters that wherever they chose had to be within a (semi-)reasonable ten hours’ train or car journey of London, Tom and Connie Barton ended up on the shores of Loch Sunart in Lochaber, in Scotland. There, they bought a cabin in Douglas fir, right at the side of the loch and beside a babbling burn.
William Jess Laird2/8Interior designer Clive Lonstein was inspired by the vernacular architecture and craft traditions of rural Colorado when he created this holiday house in the state for clients. Salvaged from an original building on the site, the ceiling was restored and the beam structure reconfigured to allow for a double-height roof over an area heated by a large fireplace in local stone. Sitting in front of it is a vintage Chesterfield leather sofa and chairs and a mid-century coffee table by Fornasetti.
Martin Morrell3/8Perched above a tidal pool on a remote Hebridean island, this traditional old farmhouse was recently restored by the model and writer turned interior designer Saffron Aldridge and her business partner Scarlett Supple. As with much of the wild West Coast of Scotland, it can easily see a full year’s range of different weather in a single day.
Lisa Flood4/8Up near the foot of the Teton Pass near Jackson Hole, Wyoming – where every place name sounds like it’s lifted from a Glen Campbell song – photographer Lisa Flood and her interior designer Emily Janak took inspiration from French design to create a sophisticated, comfortable but remote mountain log cabin.
Dean Hearne5/8North of Penrith in Cumbria, Victoria Stapleton, the founder of cashmere brand Brora, bought and renovated two cottages near the peaty borderlands with Scotland where she was raised. The cottages were without power when Victoria bought them, down a lane towards the River Eden and not too far from the Carlisle to Leeds railway.
Line T. Klein6/8In the long tradition of summer houses in Sweden, Karl Erik Halldén’s 1920s family home on the island of Öland is full of craft and pattern and personal touches. Öland is quiet and offers solitude, and outside the summer, it is wonderfully empty other than the local farmers.
Andrew Montgomery7/8Rollo Dunford Wood and Freyja Lee’s family home in Snowdonia in north Wales is an enchanted and remote place, where she crafts folklore-inspired ceramics and he restores wagons and builds cabins surrounded by the beautiful ancient countryside.
Mark Fox8/8Perched on a hill just shy of 70 degrees north and 165km north of the Arctic Circle sits Olly Williams’ rustic log cabin. It is surrounded by forests of silver birch and black spruce of Arctic Lapland, a zone of boreal forest that stretches from Norway, Sweden, Finland and into Russia. The cabin, named “Bear’s Nest” sits alone in a sacred mystical area called Outavaara, Sami for “a place where anything can happen”.
