Why these 1970s cabins are the ‘perfect’ holiday home

In parts of the British countryside, it is possible to come across clusters of beautifully designed, Scandinavian cabins. These are not the product of the latest trend for off-grid retreats, but were created half a century ago by a pair of Welsh architects, Hird & Brooks. How did they become fascinated with creating the perfect holiday home? And why were they so inspired by Denmark?

By the 1970s, John Hird and Graham Brooks had won a string of major awards for their sleek, modernist post-war villas in the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales. But the pinnacle of their career was the prefabricated wooden cabins they designed in the 1970s and 1980s for holiday parks in Wales and Forestry Commission sites in Scotland and the English counties of Cornwall and Yorkshire.

For Brooks, the cabins were a chance to distill his design ethos into its clearest, purest, most compact form, says Peter Halliday, co-author with Bethan Dalton of Cabin Crew: Hird & Brooks and the Pursuit of the Perfect Holiday House. “He could strip away the irksome necessities of domesticity that have to be accommodated in a conventional house and focus on what really matters.”

Professor Richard Weston, architect and former Chair of Architecture at Cardiff University, agrees. “[Brooks] always said the holiday cabins were the highlight of his career,” he writes in the book. “They are a synthesis of everything Graham stood for: a love of wood, an appreciation of architecture, solar orientation, and attention to detail and space—all simplified for essential living.”

Hird & Brooks were part of a worldwide boom in simple holiday homes. Many Danes and Swedes already spent their leisure time in cabins, or sommerhuse, along the coast or in forests. In 1960, Denmark had around 50,000 summerhouses. By 1975, the number had trebled, according to Cabin Crew.

It was all about simple, intelligent design, woodland settings, and a close affinity with nature – Peter Halliday

Meanwhile, the summer cottage (a close relation of the dacha) was becoming a staple of Soviet society in the Baltic states and much of Central Europe. Everyone, it seems, was at it, even the big-name architects. Le Corbusier, the grand master of modernism, created his Cabanon de Vacances in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the south of France in the early 1950s. And in the US, architect Paul Rudolph was behind a series of simple wooden structures on the Florida Keys.

The mushrooming of cabins in the UK was in part a result of increased car ownership from the 1930s, as well as the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, explains Cabin Crew. The latter led to the construction of mass-scale seaside holiday camps equipped with prefab accommodation.

Getting back to nature

Hird & Brooks’ cabins – some to be bought, others to be rented – drew on the duo’s many study trips to Denmark, because Brooks was Denmark mad. “His heroes were Danish architects, his reference points were the Danish architectural press, and his new wife helped him to embed a Danish design aesthetic into their everyday lives,” the book explains.

“It was all about simple, intelligent design, woodland settings, and a close affinity with nature,” Halliday tells the BBC. “The entire Hird & Brooks team became fascinated, and were eager to apply the same principles here in the UK.”

The firm completed their first holiday homes, for Bierwood near Tenby in Pembrokeshire, in the early 1970s. Timber-framed with exposed roof beams, these lodges were clad in pine match-boarding and had corrugated tiled roofs and Sun terraces. Inside, features included built-in beds and a galley kitchen. The colour pallet – a blue-grey stain on the exterior timber facings, and orange-red window frames and doors – was inspired by those Danish study trips.

“The clearest Scandinavian influence is the use of wood – from the big exposed structural beams to the cedar cladding to the built-in furniture to the little details like the wooden door handles and fitted coat hooks,” says Halliday. He also cites the space-saving wetrooms, “which were a complete novelty in the UK, and the wood-burning stoves, which were commonplace in Scandinavia but not available here, so the architects designed their own, and had them manufactured locally”. And for all the Welsh cabins, Brooks looked at the orientation of the Sun before positioning each cabin on its plot, so as to ensure that users could enjoy as much sunshine as possible – even if sunshine wasn’t always abundant in Wales.

Later, the Forestry Commission – a national organisation owning huge swathes of British countryside – brought in Hird & Brooks to design holiday cabins for its sites at Deerpark in Cornwall, Keldy Castle in North Yorkshire, and Taynuilt in Scotland. “For the Forestry Commission cabins, it was all about imparting a sense of adventure,” says Halliday. “That was the intended function, and everything about the design reflects it.”