In the age of Instagram and Airbnb, we’ve lost the joy of ramshackle stays

A painting of a naked woman sits next to a photo of a man flipping the bird, on a ledge above the outdoor composting toilet. Our room, which isn’t exactly a room, but a deck covered with all the things you’d ever find in a room – double bed, couch, dining table, bathtub – is littered with paintings and drawings, sculptures and art books, paints and brushes, antiques and curios.

Arriving here at Little Promised Land, a fabulously eclectic artist’s studio-cum-homestay outside Bellingen on the Mid North Coast, I feel instantly more creative. As though I’ve whisked my imagination, rather than my husband, away for the weekend.

Life revolves around the covered deck at Little Promised Land.

At a time when hotels and Airbnbs are becoming increasingly polished and Instagram-ready, these off-beat getaways are becoming increasingly rare. This is a great tragedy, since they’re the travel equivalent of the wonky organic food and natural wine and handmade clothes so many of us cherish, and a nod to the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, or imperfect beauty.

Waking up to the sound of cows chewing, metres from your bed, or replacing your morning shower with an outdoor bath overlooking a goose dam, might not be to everyone’s taste. Nor might the 18 mismatched teaspoons or the chipped plates in the outdoor kitchen.

Grazing cow and mountain view From Little Promised Land.

But this kind of slightly rough-edged stay is, to my mind, a kind of beacon of humanity. It’s a reminder that nothing is ever truly perfect, or permanent, and that real beauty resides in flaws – something Leonard Cohen, with his famous lyric, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”, knew full well.

It’s also the antithesis of all that’s wrong with the modern travel world, those soulless predictable places that deliver sanitised, cookie-cutter experiences only to squash our creativity and souls.

Here’s the exciting part: the more quirky and unpredictable the stay, the more quirky and unpredictable you seem to become while you’re there.

Here in Bellingen, we’d planned to spend our first day hiking along the Never Never River and having a picnic. But as the morning sun streamed over our deck bed and the kookaburras streaked past, we asked ourselves: why get out? Why, when we could bird watch, picnic, read and write, breathe the wild air, all from this beautifully bizarre outdoor bed? Neither of us could find a good reason.

The bed at Little Promised Land is found on the deck along with the outdoor bath.

And so we stayed, like John and Yoko staging a bed-in, until 4pm when the sun dropped behind the mountains and we had to drag ourselves out for a dinner booking.

Staying in bed all day might sound kind of unhinged, but if we can’t unhinge ourselves a little with our travels then what are they actually for? Embracing the perfectly imperfect nature of these places does, I think, help us embrace the same in our own lives, and to move away from the artificial curation of life that Instagram has fostered.

If we can look at a chipped mug or a frayed towel, a cracked window or a dusty ornament with affection on our weekend away, then maybe we’ll be a little more likely to look at the wrinkles on our faces, or our own messy houses, or the mistakes we make, with less criticism and more kindness, too.

Another recent ramshackle stay was at a surf shack called the Happy Sun House, set in the middle of a national park about half an hour’s drive from Byron Bay. The owners were an artist-musician couple and there were paintings and wabi-sabi antiques everywhere; the couch had the words “ride the rainbow” hand-embroidered across its back, and the place was filled with such authentic creative energy, I started feeling quite Hemingway-esque.

Curios and knick-knacks adorn shelves.

As a result, I got very drunk on red wine in the middle of the day and wrote an entire chapter of a book I was working on.

So you see, these places are imagination incubators that help you enter a world of creative honesty and self-expression that just doesn’t happen in sterile, expressionless blond wood and glass Scandi-style places.

When it comes to sustainability, ramshackle stays come up trumps, too. They’re often off-grid, like the two I’ve just mentioned, and furnished with vintage and second-hand things that don’t have to be the newest and cleanest, so there’s less waste. The aim is character and vibrancy, rather than immaculacy. In an increasingly homogenised world, surely that’s something we could all lean towards.