Remote cabins offer a new kind of bliss

Unyoked’s network of tiny off-grid accommodation is a big step away from the lavish experience we often seek on holidays but it’s increasingly popular with burned-out Australians.

Unyoked has a network of off grid cabins hidden in the wild but easily accessible from your door.

Over the past few decades, being busy has become equated with being important. A strangely aspirational part of western culture, busy became the currency upon which we traded our relevance in a fast-moving world, giving birth to terms such as “side-hustle” and “glambition”, and the LinkedIn not-so-humblebrag. But to be busy is to need to recharge, and as the enforced solitude and reconnection with nature many city-dwellers experienced during these past two years of the pandemic showed, switching off is imperative to being switched on.

It’s a notion supported by an increasing number of studies. Research by psychologist Ester Buchholz, author of The Call of Solitude, shows that spending time alone is an important part of human existence and essential to the genesis of our best creative work. Imke Kirste, a researcher at Duke Medical School, discovered that silence is closely associated with the development of new cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

Unyoked Olive, Tasmania.

“It’s scientifically proven that time out in nature boosts creativity and productivity by around 50 per cent,” says Cam Grant, the founder, with twin brother Chris, of Australian start-up Unyoked, which the pair describe as a nature dispensary. Chris elucidates the point by citing a 2012 study in which one group of people was sent out into the wilderness for four days while the other stayed in the city, after which both groups were given a series of complex puzzles to solve. “You can guess which group did better,” says Chris. “The benefits of spending time outdoors have been empirically proven. It makes you smarter, makes you more creative, makes you make better decisions.”

On the surface, the Grant brothers’ business venture is an Airbnb-style series of remote properties, but Cam and Chris choose not to view Unyoked as an accommodation company. Guests book their cabins with the ostensible function of being housed for a short stay, but for Unyoked, the accommodation component is merely a way to give them access to another, more important element: nature. This, Cam and Chris believe, is something that should be tapped into for human benefit in the same way that we sleep for rest and exercise for energy, shifting the way we perceive our engagement with the natural world from nice-to-have to necessity.

“When we started people thought we were like Airbnb,” explains Chris. “They didn’t quite get it. The cabins aren’t an afterthought – they’re beautifully designed and help make the experience special – but they’re there to facilitate accessing nature more frequently.”

Unyoked has cabins across the east coast of Australia in areas such as the Central Coast hinterland, the Hunter Valley and the Southern Highlands, as well as in Tasmania, and coming soon are locations near Perth and Adelaide. The cabins take design cues from traditional Scandinavian log cabins in their stripped-back simplicity and visual integration of the surrounding landscape. Crafted largely from sustainable, natural materials, the off-grid, solar-powered cabins are free of excess ornamentation, and typically include bedding, linen, kitchen supplies, a gas stove, and often an outdoor fire pit. Pack your sunscreen and mosquito repellent, the company recommends, but leave your laptop and spreadsheets at home.

“In science there’s this term: minimum effective dose,” explains Cam. “That’s what we look to deliver with each of our properties – that within a two-hour drive from a city you can have the minimum effective dose of these scientifically proven benefits of nature.” So while the cabins are neatly appointed and comprise most everything you’ll need for a quiet, restful stay, there are purposely no five-star bells and whistles, and no team on site to service your stay. “We intentionally have people park at least 200m away [from the cabin] because it helps to disconnect you from your normal life,” adds Cam. “You’ll park, then walk through a winding path, down a track, before you see this little cabin in a clearing on top of a hill, or down by a river, and you start to feel so removed from your day-to-day that it instantly causes you to start feeling those positive benefits. It’s about complete immersion.”

Unyoked founders Cam and Chris Grant.

Unyoked further espouses the concept of nature-as-a-service through a multitude of creative initiatives. Late last year the start-up released its first writer’s anthology, featuring the work of nearly two dozen emerging writers, poets and essayists. Selected from 350 entries from across Australia, the writers were provided regular, no-strings access to Unyoked cabins for six months, affording them the creative freedom needed after so many months of lockdown to dream up new original work. “Time in the cabins has allowed me to unfurl, focus on quiet movements, slow thoughts down, deeply listen and reconnect with nature,” said Anne-Marie Te Whiu, one of the selected writers alongside Maya Hodge, Ruby Gill and Robert Juan Kennard and others. “These breaks have had profound effects on me.” Unyoked had previously produced a similar project with musicians.

A recent round of fundraising is allowing Unyoked to expand its footprint, but the brothers hold firm that we won’t ever be seeing hundreds and hundreds of cabins dotted around the country. “A lot goes into the locations,” explains Chris. “It’s so critical to the experience that the location is particularly special, and if you’re situated next to a busy road, or you’ve got man-made structures in your view, then it’s going to detract from being able to realise the benefits.” And though they receive thousands of applications from landowners wanting to host an Unyoked cabin on their property – an easy way to make money, for sure – the company has a rigorous review process in place.

“Of those applications we only ever select a few, and we have a dedicated team of scouts that have the lucky job of getting to go out to these amazing places to explore the area and meet the owners. We have to make sure there’s enough of what we call the awe factor; it’s that tingle on the back of your neck you get when you’re looking up at a mountain or a massive tree. It’s really about finding unique private landscapes in Australia and unlocking them to the public like never before.”

“It’s that tingle on the back of your neck you get when you’re looking up at a mountain or a massive tree. It’s really about finding unique private landscapes in Australia and unlocking them to the public like never before.” — Chris Grant.

The brothers founded Unyoked with some serious entrepreneurial chops: Cam was a strategy manager in the business and private bank team of Commonwealth Bank, while Chris was in sales for a venture-backed education-tech start-up. Their respective backgrounds, they say, helped them lay the foundations of a strong business from the very beginning, but also really helped refine their vision for Unyoked in terms of what they were wanting to escape from.

“The need for [Unyoked] was definitely spurred from how we used to live our lives,” says Chris. “We grew up spending a heap of time outdoors and then we both ended up working in these quite corporate roles and it led to some friction. We were spending way too much time on our laptops in these rigid corporate structures, and it just didn’t gel with our natures. The pursuit of starting a business was twofold: it was something Cam and I wanted to do our whole lives, to build something for ourselves, and at the same time we landed on a problem that we ourselves were facing.”

Unyoked Rica, Queensland.

But now that they’re business owners, responsible for a handful of employees and a growing portfolio of properties, do they find themselves slipping back into that daily rhythm of being chained to a desk?

“We’ve taken a conscious approach to building a culture we believe in,” says Chris. “It’s all about creative collaboration, and switching off to be able to be switched back on. The corporate background is something we would both really recommend for people wanting to be entrepreneurs – it’s been so beneficial to us to have that experience – but it’s also taught us what we don’t want to be and what we don’t want to do. Hopefully our team thinks the same, and I think that they would.”

The sentiment is shared by the majority of Unyoked guests. According to Cam and Chris, some 96 per cent of visitors report a positive influence on their overall wellbeing after even a short stay. “For a lot of people, they’ll come because they think it’s cool or they’ve seen it on social media, but after their stay they really get it,” says Cam. “They feel better, they feel de-stressed. And it’s almost like this ‘aha’ moment, when you have this little moment of clarity and realise what this is all about.”

The appeal of Unyoked’s offering particularly resonates as we emerge from Covid, and to date the brothers have raised some $6 million in funds to grow the business and, in turn, service the demand that’s seen the cabins consistently booked at near-full capacity. Outside of Australia, there are now three cabins within three hours of Auckland, New Zealand, and 10 cabins within three hours of London – the result of its most recent round of fundraising, which included a parcel open to its own community to invest in for as little as $250.

“We’re not a travel company. We’re not an accommodation company. We’re not a tiny house company,” says Chris. “We’re a nature services company, and people are really starting to realise that time outdoors is more than just about being outside. It’s about having flexibility, living fluidly, and using nature as a tool. We want Unyoked to keep being the platform for that.”