Before arriving at Bather’s Cabin, you’re given a set of instructions on how to get there – the first sign that this is not quite a normal weekend away. The route takes you off the main road and down through the old farm, past a timber yard stacked with the raw material of everything that is to come, and on through fields so plush and green they're glowing from within, while trees cascade like covered walkways, keeping you dry from the rain drops scheduled for a typical UK summer in early June. The woodlands are a little wild and you are not entirely sure what you will find at the end of the path. There is no one else in sight; no other cabins, no other cars or guests. You feel, in the best possible way, entirely alone.
You could easily walk past the cabin if you’re not looking carefully, and it is only when you notice a path where the woodland subtly parts ways that you are confronted by a run of hidden steps, leading you to a black, jagged, almost brutalist timber facade – stacked dark shingles folding back on themselves like the roofline of a building designed to be nestled away. Inside, the palette drops even further with tones of cosy charcoal, near-black concrete-effect surfaces and deep tiled textures, softened by beige linen and Tekla towels, bedding and robes folded pristinely. The kitchen is small but perfectly sized for two, stocked with brownies and cookies, tea and coffee, and breakfast fit with granola made on the farm itself, fresh eggs, fruit, yoghurt and a sweet pumpkin and chia seed bread. In the bathroom – an open-plan room that the whole cabin centres itself around – the tub is the largest you’ve encountered, placed like a centrepiece and flanked by sage to burn, bath salts, oils and a small chime for a sound bath while you soak. The soaps and shampoos are all natural, courtesy of Reia.
The afternoon gets started with Earl Grey and biscuits, dunked slowly while heavy rain sets in outside and the sauna – located on the cabin’s rooftop spa – ticks up to temperature. You sit in woven chairs positioned to watch foxes appear in the meadow outside the window, the grass a gleaming yellow despite the grey sky pressing down on it. By the time you make it into the sauna, a compact electric model, the rain has cleared and the evening has turned intermittently sunny. The rooftop deck is planted with shrubs and low greenery along a wooden walkway that threads from sauna to outdoor shower to plunge tub, and giant oak trees canopy the whole space, holding off any last drops of rain and lending the deck a jungle-like feeling, as though you’d been dropped somewhere tropical rather than into the Sussex countryside. The early evening sun warms your face, and at some point you might doze off without meaning to – a sign that your bathing ritual has very much gone well. Dinner is cooked over an open fire outside, if the weather allows it, and afterwards comes the real privilege of having your own sauna rather than a shared one: you can use it whenever you like. So a second, night-time sauna follows, the decking lit with low, cosy lighting, the woodland now pitchblack. The plunge tub, this time, runs hotter, closer to a jacuzzi than a cold bath, and you sit in it for a long while before finally, properly, unwinding into bed.
Waking is its own kind of event, curtains left open through the night so that floor-to-ceiling glass frames the hillside meadow and the trees first thing – better still when the rain returns and you’re warm and dry inside, wrapped in an intricately designed cabin. A last bath, oils included, precedes breakfast, and you leave with soft exfoliated skin and a sense of calm. The only regret might be that you didn’t stay longer.
Bathers Cabin is the newest addition to Architects Holiday, a design-led woodland retreat at Great Park Farm in East Sussex, founded by architects Will Gowland and Harry Kay. Launched to guests from 1 May 2026 alongside its sibling, Yogis Cabin, it joins the site's existing wood-fired Drying Shed Sauna as part of a growing collection of crafted, ritual-led retreat spaces. Architects Holiday grew directly out of Gowland and Kay's architecture practice, Built Works, established in 2020 and now operating as an independent brand in its own right. Where Built Works serves clients within the usual constraints of budget, brief and risk appetite, Architects Holiday is a place for full-scale, occupied experiments in low-carbon, biogenic construction, built almost entirely from timber and natural materials sourced from the land around them. Each cabin is organised around a single restorative ritual – the Bathers Cabin takes water, heat and cold as its subject, while Yogis Cabin takes movement. But rather than adding wellness on top of a standard room, like a sauna or tub bolted onto an otherwise ordinary stay, the ritual becomes the entire architectural programme.
To understand the thinking behind the project, Anima chats with Gowland and Kay to talk through the founding of Architects Holiday, the design and construction of Bathers Cabin, and what comes next.
Let’s begin by hearing about yourselves and how you came to set up Architects Holiday.
Will Gowland: We met as students, studying architecture together, and went on to set up our practice, Built Works. There’s a long-running joke amongst architects that we never actually go on holiday. You go somewhere, you see a beautiful building, and all you want to do is talk about it. Architects Holiday started as a private joke between the two of us, and then it slowly became the whole point.
More seriously, it grew out of a genuine frustration with client-led work. However good the project, you are always designing within someone else’s constraints: their budget, their brief, their appetite for risk. We wanted a space where we could explore, without compromise, what low-carbon, biogenic construction could really look, feel and perform like, building almost entirely from timber and natural materials drawn from the land around us.
So Architects Holiday and Built Works are two sides of the same thing. Built Works is the practice; Architects Holiday is where we test our ideas at full scale, in the open, with real guests living inside them. The cabins are effectively live experiments. Each one is built around a single restorative practice, whether that is bathing, movement or rest, and designed from the inside out to support it completely. What we learn here feeds back into everything we do as a practice. The East Sussex countryside, and Great Park Farm in particular, was the natural place to do it.
Can you tell us about the concept for Architects Holiday and why each cabin is built around a single ritual? Why was bathing the right ritual for this cabin?
Harry Kay: Most hospitality design treats wellness as an amenity, something layered on top of a fairly conventional brief: a nice room, and then a sauna or a tub added as an extra. We wanted to invert that completely. With each cabin, the ritual is the primary architectural programme, the thing that every spatial, material and orientational decision serves. The accommodation becomes secondary to the practice the building exists to enable.
Designing around a single ritual is what gives each cabin its clarity. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, the building can be shaped entirely around one experience and do that one thing exceptionally well. It is a more honest way to design, and a more immersive way to stay.
Bathing felt like the right ritual to begin with because it is one of the oldest restorative practices we have, and one of the most universal. There is something elemental about water, heat and cold, and about the slowing down that bathing demands of you. The site already had a real bathing culture through our Drying Shed Sauna, so Bathers Cabin felt like a natural and more complete expression of that. Bathing also rewards architecture in a way few other activities do: it is all about thresholds, privacy, the contrast of hot and cold, the framing of a view while you soak. That gave us a great deal to work with.
The cabin is inspired by traditional granaries and grain stores in South East England – why draw from this, and how did it inspire the architecture and design?
HK: We are always interested in the modest agricultural vernacular of this part of England, the working buildings rather than the grand ones. Granaries and grain stores are a lovely example: simple, elevated timber structures, often louvered, built with great care for a single purpose, which was to protect something precious. We liked that idea enormously. A granary was built to shelter and contain the harvest. Bathers Cabin shelters and contains the bather, and the ritual itself.
WG: Practically, the reference shaped the architecture in a few ways. The elevated form lets the cabin sit lightly on the woodland floor, touching the ground gently and minimising its impact on the mature trees and roots around it. Lifting the building also lifts the bathing spaces up off the forest floor, drawing them closer to the canopy and giving a real sense of privacy and seclusion. The cladding is larch, felled in the surrounding woodland and treated with Scandinavian pine tar to give a rich, blackened finish, which echoes the tarred timber of traditional agricultural buildings and helps the cabin recede into the shade of the trees.
The louvered drying sheds of the region informed the handling of light and air too, the way a building can filter and modulate what passes through it. It is a contemporary interpretation rather than a pastiche. We were drawing on the spirit and the logic of those structures, not copying them.
Talk us through the build – how did it all come together, were there any challenges or surprises?
WG: We built it largely with our own hands, on site. That is central to how we work; it keeps us close to the material and to every decision. The larch cladding was felled from the surrounding woodland, milled and finished on site, then treated with Scandinavian pine tar for that blackened, weather-protective finish. The structure is timber, insulated with UK-grown hemp, so the fabric of the building is overwhelmingly natural and low-carbon. The tiles, textiles and joinery were all hand-crafted from natural materials, and we deliberately let the process show. We are interested in the marks of making, the small imperfections that tell you a human hand was involved.
The most demanding part was the rooftop deck. Taking the bathing ritual up into the canopy meant carrying a sauna, a hot tub and an ice bath on the roof of a timber cabin, and water is heavy, so the structure beneath it had to be carefully resolved. Servicing a building in the most private, and often the wettest, corner of the woodland was a challenge, and doing it in a way that stayed true to our environmental principles took real thought.
Each cabin has its own architectural identity – can you tell us about what makes Bathers Cabin stand out and differ from the others, and the specific design elements you chose, and why?
HK: Of all the cabins, Bathers is the most introverted and the most private. Where Yogis Cabin opens outward, with large sliding doors and an engawa deck dissolving the line between inside and out, Bathers turns inward, towards water and stillness. It is nestled in the most secluded part of the woodland, and the whole experience is about retreat and recovery rather than connection to the wider landscape.
The clearest expression of our philosophy is that the spa occupies most of the cabin’s footprint. The bathing really is the building. At its heart is a hand-crafted soaking tub positioned to look straight out into the forest, so that the simple act of bathing is framed by the trees. Then the rooftop deck takes that further: a sauna, a hot tub and an ice bath arranged for a proper hot-and-cold bathing sequence, completely private amongst the treetops. That vertical journey, from the intimate soaking tub below to the open ritual above, is unique to this cabin.
Materially, Bathers Cabin differs from Yogis Cabin in a deliberate way. Yogis is charred larch and Douglas fir, drawing on Japanese craft. Bathers is larch finished in Scandinavian pine tar, drawing on the agricultural granary tradition. Both arrive at a blackened timber building that belongs in the woodland, but they get there by different routes. The blackened finish on Bathers was chosen so the cabin almost disappears into the shade, heightening that sense of stumbling upon something hidden.
We love the kitchenware, the chairs and the Tekla! Can you tell us about the interior products, the thinking behind the curation, and where they were sourced?
WG: Thank you, that means a lot, because the first thing to say about the interior is that almost nothing in it was bought. Almost everything was made, by us, by our families, and from the timber left over from the build. That isn’t really a design philosophy, it is just who we are.
Beyond what we made ourselves, we were very deliberate about the brands we brought in, choosing partners whose values genuinely align with ours. Tekla Fabrics felt like the perfect fit, given their strong design concept and is a world built around bathing and sauna culture. They provide the bedding, towels and robes. Reia, a sustainable UK bath and body brand, supplies the bathroom amenities, and FLOKS provide British-made wool bedding and mattresses. The kitchenware comes from Common Objects, the ceramics brand of Harry’s wife Sarah, who made the plates, bowls and mugs specifically for the cabin. The hand-made tiles were made by Harry and his family, unglazed to reduce the energy used in firing them. Everything that surrounds you carries a trace of the people who made it, and every choice is considered.
One of the most striking aspects of the experience is how hidden the cabin feels; you almost stumble across it through the trees. How much thought went into that sense of arrival? What do you want someone to feel in the first five minutes inside?
HK: An enormous amount of thought went into it, because for Bathers Cabin the arrival is really the beginning of the ritual. We chose the most private part of the woodland deliberately, and everything from the blackened larch to the elevated, low-impact form is designed to let the cabin recede into the trees rather than announce itself. The intention is exactly what you describe: you should feel as though you are discovering something, rather than checking in somewhere.
That sense of concealment does something important. By the time you reach the cabin, the rest of the world has already fallen away. The approach, the trees closing in, the slow reveal, all of it is working on you before you have stepped inside.
Bathers Cabin is intentionally inward-looking, so rather than a big view, you get a feeling of sanctuary, of being wrapped in timber and surrounded by woodland, with water at the centre of everything. We want the day-to-day to switch off almost involuntarily, and give quiet permission to slow down.
More cabins are planned for 2027 – a Chef’s Cabin, a Musician’s Cabin. Can you tell us about your future plans?
WG: Bathers and Yogis are the first of a growing collection, and 2027 will bring three more, each built around its own ritual. Chef’s Cabin will be centred on a masterclass kitchen, crowned with a fruiting green roof, where cooking and gathering become the architecture. Musician’s Cabin will have an open-plan music room with instruments built in, designed for immersive sound and music-making. And Explorer’s Cabin will be for those seeking a deeper connection with the surrounding landscape.
The thread running through all of them is the same idea we started with: an experimental typology where accommodation is secondary to the ritual it enables, whether that is bathing, movement, music-making, exploration or gastronomy. Together they offer a real alternative to the conventional luxury hotel stay, highly specific architectures for specific practices, rooted in a specific landscape.
More broadly, every cabin lets us push our thinking on low-carbon, biogenic construction a little further, and that ambition, to keep building beautiful, deeply considered, environmentally conscious spaces, is what will guide wherever Architects Holiday goes next.
Bathers Cabin and Yogis Cabin are located at Great Park Farm, East Sussex. More information can be found on their website and Instagram