Cabin porn: why hideaways are hot right now

Forget Guccie's furry loafers or a Prada overcoat. What everyone in fashion wants in 2016 is a log cabin

I've got cabin fever. And not only the New York, need-to-stop-eating-and-start-moving kind. I've got cabin fever because that's where I'd really like to be right now. In a cabin. Wooden, obviously. In a clearing in the middle of a forest, maybe. A lake would be nice, perhaps with a rickety little jetty. Door propped open with a stack of books, sheepskin over a chair on the porch, antlers on the sparsely decorated walls.

Well of course this is what I want. Not because I am remotely adventurous or quirky but because I am hopelessly, helplessly enslaved by fashion, and a log cabin is what everyone wants right now. Cabin Porn, the popular Tumblr documenting wilderness living is now a cult book. The sexist character in the second series of THe Affair on Sky Atlantic was Noah and Alison's wooden lakeside retreat, all homely quilting on mezzanine bed, and a jetty to dive from.

That the log cabin is a thing right now is encapsulated most clearly in the Soho Farmhouse, the latest venture from Nick Jones's Soho House empire, and the place where anyone who is is anyone is hanging out right now. There are 40 log cabins, all pitched roofs and tastefully mismatched planks. There are trees and lakes and winding paths. I haven't been, by the way, but I've been down enough Google-image rabbit holes to feel like I know it well, down to the wooden rockers posed picturesquely at the Gatehouse, with its rustic crossbar gate. It is actually in Oxfordshire, but the look borrows from the iconography of Montana, or Sweden, or the Highlands.

At any moment in time, there is an ideal place to which everyone aspires to hang out, and - just like the perfect body or the aspirational wardrobe - that ideal shifts. That's why Pinterest was invented, as an ever-shifting moodboard on which we can collectively tweak the specifics of how to lay a table, or pack a suitcase, or go on holiday.

I grew up in the era of Dallas and Dynasty, in which the house of collective dreams was enormous, with a swimming pool in a lurid chemical, Hockney blue. That was the paradigm that told the world you had made it. You don't see them so much any more in the pages of Conde Nast Traveller, those big brash castles, which I guess means that the image no longer sells magazines. After the Dynasty mansion era came the 90s, and the fetishization of the loft apartment: a specific kind of restless, urban fantasy, part treehouse and part cocktail bar, a stage set for gazing enigmatically down at streamers of tail-lights from a lofty height.

In 2007, the number of people living in cities worldwide overtook those living in the countryside, for the first time; around that time, we started fantasizing about rural living instead of urban. A grown-up weekend-away-in-a-country-house hotel, a roses-around-the-door family cottage. So there has been a key change, to get from there to where we are now, fantasizing about hideaways in the wilderness. The typical image of a log cabin depicts it postage stamp-sized in the middle of the picture, with an expanse of natural space - trees, clouds, water, or all three - all around. This visual trick does two things. FIrst, it emphasizes the diminutive size fo the actual building. That this a place for just one or two is a virtue now, rather than a lack. Where the Cath Kidston rural bliss fantasies of old were convivial and social - all outsize teapots and kitchen suppers whipped up over a well-thumed Nigella volume - the new ideal is more about isolation than largesse. Also, by dramatizing the wildness of the outside, it fetishizes the cosiness of indoors.

Sometimes it feels as if the internet has created a world without boundaries - between public and private, between you and me - so that we buzz around all day in one endlessly interlocking hive mind. So it's not hard to see why we might crave a tiny, safe, human-scale space, defiantly unconnected from the rest of the world. Soho Farmhouse is, of course, just playing with the aesthetics of this - there would probably be a mass exodus back to London if the Wi-Fi were to go down. But it is interesting, still, to see how the fantasy being offered to overwrought metropolitans has changed in the 18 years since the same people opened Babington House, a country-house fantasy of four-poster beds and velvet sofas, rolling lawns and croquet mallets.