The sauna has had a glow-up.
What used to be a beige cabinet in the corner of a leisure centre is now wood-fired, off-grid, set in proper wilderness or built with real design ambition.
We’ve rounded up some of the stays taking it furthest - saunas designed as the reason to stay, not the bonus you forgot to use.
One surrounded by ancient Scottish oak. One reached only by boat. One tucked 300m deep into Irish meadow. One beside a wild swimming lake on a Somerset vineyard.
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Hadn’t quite realised how much we needed these last few days away and what an incredible place to rest and recover. Out in the forest in a beautiful treehouse with just the sounds of the birds and the occasional field mouse rustling through the leaves. So incredibly grateful to @kiphideaways for gifting this stay and helping find The Quist, a place where we could relax and unwind. I’ve been using them for a few years now as they have such an amazing array of hideaways right across the UK and once again we were so impressed with our stay 💕
The signal may be weak but the views are not.
Swap screen time for proper down time: no schedule, no doom-scrolling. Just you, nature, and time to just *be*.
These are the cabins built for going fully, unapologetically off-grid in 2026.
Save for when you’re ready to disappear for a while 💭
2 cabins on a Cotswolds family farm - 1 green, 1 blue - each slotted into its own alcove in a centuries-old woodland. Curved bays carved into the trees somewhere in the 1700s, originally cut to shelter livestock. Now they shelter you.
The owner’s an artist and it shows: reclaimed timber, a pillarbox-red kitchen, his own work on the walls. Hot-and-cold tub on the deck, shared sauna in the middle, Jersey cows for neighbours.
The Cotswolds, but turn the saturation up.
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1.5 hours from Liverpool Street and you’re at a hut the owners built themselves - dug out the pond, sewed the textiles, hauled the antiques back from car boots and vintage fairs. The kind of project that takes years and shows it in every detail.
Smooth cork panels meeting up-cycled wood cladding. A small kitchen finished with ceramics from a maker down the road. Fold-away bedside tables perfectly sized for your cup of tea. A floral headboard as the centrepiece.
The pond is right there for a morning dip if you’re up for it. If not, the bed faces the water and breakfast can happen there instead.
It works for 1, for 2, or for a group if you book both huts - the shepherd’s hut next door has a wood-fired bath that looks out over rapeseed fields.
Beach walks, camp fires, wild swimming if anyone’s brave enough. The Essex coast does summer better than it gets credit for.
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Aberdeenshire’s a proper drive north from most of the UK. Which is sort of the point.
This A-frame has a glass apex above the bed, so you basically sleep looking up at the sky. There’s a wood-fired hot tub in the garden, 900 acres of Highland wilderness around it, and the Northern Lights show up often enough that the family who live on site don’t really make a fuss about it.
Owner Ross runs the place with his family. There’s a walled garden you can pick from, a fold of Highland Coos in the paddocks, and a river running through if you fancy a swim or a slow afternoon of doing nothing in particular.
Choose from the A-frame - sleeping 2 or Butler’s Cottage for 4. Both have hot tubs, firepits, pizza ovens.
Worth the drive? Undeniably.
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What if you actually did it this year.
Booked the week. Drove to the coast. Said yes to the swim, the long lunch, the walk that ends up being twice as long as planned.
We spend a lot of time finding the stays that make that easier - the ones with the deck above the harbour, the ones at the end of the track with nothing to do but walk, the ones where you can’t help but slip into a new rhythm.
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There’s a particular kind of holiday that begins on a train.
The slow exhale as the city falls away. A book opened, then forgotten in favour of the window. Sandwiches eaten at 11am, because you’re on holiday now and the usual rules don’t apply.
No keys, no traffic, no working out where to park. Some journeys take 90 minutes; some take longer and reward you for it. Either way, there’s nothing quite like arriving - salt in the air, suitcase in hand, the sea a short walk from the platform.
Here are some of our favourite stays in seaside towns, reachable by train.
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A cabin in a world of your own - and yet just a walk through the trees to the best pub in Staffordshire.
Inside, it’s pared-back and Scandi: windows wide enough that the parkland does most of the decorating, and a kingsize bed positioned so the view hits before you’ve sat up. Days fall into shape slowly: coffee in bed while the sun comes up. A trail straight from the door, on foot or two wheels. A walk to dinner before dark, and a slower one home in the half-light.
The kind of stay where you forget where you even put your phone.
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You could fly to the Serengeti. Or you could drive to a field outside Peterborough.
Teal Lodge is a safari tent in the proper sense - canvas walls, timber frame, deck looking out over its own lake. Archie and Emma left corporate jobs in London to build it, drawing on a family connection to Kenya to bring a touch of safari home.
There’s no pretending it’s the Maasai Mara. But roll up the side of the tent in the morning, swim across the lake before breakfast and spot wildlife from the back of the owners’ landrover and the gap narrows further than you’d think.
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Just you and that view.
A wall of glass, a wood-burner, and Loch Bracadale doing something different every hour.
The MacLeod’s Tables on the horizon. Deer through the bracken at dusk, eagles overhead if you’re paying attention. Coffee drunk slowly while the weather rolls in.
These 2 timber cabins on a croft on the western edge of Skye were built to put you in the landscape rather than shut it out. A fish van comes through on Wednesday afternoons - you can pre-order hand-dived scallops. Otherwise it’s just the sound of the wind in the bracken and whatever the loch is doing.
This one’s in high-demand - 1 week left in August.
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You could book a hotel. Or sleep on a wood-panelled boat on a rewilded Somerset lake, dive off the deck in the morning, and spend the rest of the day on 173 acres that a family of beavers have already decided is worth staying for.
There’s a wood-fired sauna, a wildflower meadow, and home-cooked meals if you ask nicely. The signal’s patchy. You won’t notice.
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