Permanent Cabin 2 Is a Minimalist, Sustainable, and Perfect Summer Retreat

Permanent Cabin 2 is what an ideal summer retreat should look like. It’s been recently completed, delivered, and assembled on site (on private land, in Berry in New South Wales, Australia), and it’s a testament of what can be achieved in terms of downsized footprint, use of recyclable materials, and sustainability—all of it without compromise to comfort or good looks. At the same time, as the project descriptions on ArchDaily reveals, it’s a piece of modern art and an isolated location that offers privacy, the basics for comfortable living, and the most unique experience for guests.

At first sight, Permanent Cabin 2 doesn’t even look like a real house. It’s comprised of two corrugated copper towers connected by a short deck and perched atop a hill, and its purpose is hardly evident from a distance. It remains so even as you get closer, and that’s because, when not in use, the house closes up: Rob Brown, lead project architect from Casey Brown Architecture, tells the New Atlas that inspiration for the project came from flowers, which close up at night.

“Night” for Permanent Cabin 2 means whenever it’s empty. When offering lodging to two guests, it opens up like a flower on three sides through winch-activated decks that serve double functionality: expanding available space and offering shelter from the elements. The house is a two-story, two-tower construction, surrounded by even more decks.

The main tower comprises the living and cooking area on the ground floor, a multi-functional room that includes cooking facilities, a sink with running water, a wood stove, hidden storage space under the floorboards, space to lounge, and the bedroom upstairs. It sounds more complicated in writing than it is in reality: as the project description puts it, the retreat offers “everything you need” but “the demands of living [are] distilled to the essentials.” This is minimalism living in the finest form.

The smaller tower is the bathroom and it’s accessible by means of a deck at the rear of the bigger tower. You have a compost toilet behind the door and a shower on the deck. You won’t need to worry about passers-by gawking at you as you shower because the retreat is only accessible by foot. In theory, at least, you have to know it’s there and how to get to it to find it. The retreat is visible from a distance, but the shower area is hidden from view.

Permanent Cabin 2 offers 3x3 meters (9.8x9.8 feet) of living space, which sounds (and is) incredibly cramped. Once you expand the decks, though, you get more space because the outside becomes livable, too. That is enough for Casey Brown Architecture to proudly state that the retreat is big enough to allow “two people to co-exist in the same area without uncomfortably invading each other’s personal space.”

Permanent Cabin 2 is built with recycled ironbark, sourced from an unused wharf float, and covered in corrugated copper sheets that protect it from the elements. The interior is inspired by nautical designs, and the isolated location probably helps with feeling as if you’re alone at sea—cut off from the rest of the world, but not lost.

“Cut off” is not an exaggeration, either. Everything about this tiny is meant to help you stay off the grid. You have running water from the rainwater collected on the roofs on both towers, fed into the shower and sink by gravitation, you have the compost toilet, and you have solar panels integrated into the roof that meet electricity requirements (which are probably small). You have everything you need for the perfect vacation if this is the kind of vacation you want.

The Permanent Cabin 2 is “a getaway, a permanent tent, a place to enjoy nature and live simply,” reads the project description. We should have led with that because it’s the most pertinent description possible, with only this addition: it’s also quite gorgeous.