Behind the scenes… ‘The Woodland Cabin’

If you watched episode two of ‘Amazing Spaces’ I hope you enjoyed peeking into the tiny woodland cabin we featured and share my enthusiasm for the thing of true beauty and charm that it is. With the look and feel of a prospector’s hut, perched on top of that steep hillside overlooking Lake Windermere, it is a place that’s hard not to love. While we were making the show, up there in an almost secret world, it felt like a privilege to be allowed in. The combination of a hidden place set against the expanse of beautiful distant horizon instills a true sense of escape and seclusion.

The cabin is the creation of DT teacher Tim Sands. Tim had a clear vision of how this woodsman shack should be… relevant, beautiful and functional. Being essentially a practical space, it needed to house chainsaws, heavy tools, contain a proper work-bench, and be in all ways a working environment. It is a functional space so it couldn’t be delicate or precious.

Tim keeps a tumblr page ; it was through this and several phone conversations, that his view of how the place should look evolved. Tim posted pictures of objects he liked which grew to make his own mood-board. It was a great way to see that the practical demands of the space didn’t exclude a clear visual aesthetic.

We kept the sense of the environment too – rough wood, metal, twigs, wool, an old detailed local ordnance survey map – and added some decoration in the form of textile art and a painting by Tim’s girlfriend Julie M-G Nixon. The cabin was heated by a tiny wood-burning stove, the back-plate of which I can happily say was inspired by Tim’s observation of corrugated iron used in a similar way in ‘The Shack’; a tiny cabin in West Virginia featured in ‘My Cool… shed’. Clothes storage was tackled in another simple and beautiful way; they were hung on a nail on the back of a door, or on coathangers that Tim fashioned from a small branch with the ‘hook’ turned into a loop of proper rough twine.

The familiar injection moulded 1970’s chair that sits on the deck follows the same direction… practical, weatherproof and stylish. It reminds me of my school years but here, rather than looking at a blackboard, it surveys that fabulous landscape. I know which view I prefer.

For more details of what went on at the cabin, have a look at George Clarke’s show scrapbook.