How "Cabin Porn" Took Over the Internet

In 2009, Zach Klein wanted to escape the internet. The now 42-year-old built his career online: originally a partner at CollegeHumor, he began working on the launch of video-sharing site Vimeo in 2005. Klein never thought that the internet would be his career path; like many millennials, he had dreamed of working in a field that, by the time we became working adults, had all but died: print media. (He would wind up as the CEO of Dwell from 2020 to 2023.) To distract himself, Klein immersed himself in a passion project. The concept was simple—he posted photographs of cabins and tiny homes on Tumblr—but the name was catchy. Enter "Cabin Porn."

"I decided to post daydreams[…]sort of like the path I didn’t take," Klein says as he reminisces about the project more than 15 years later. He filled the Tumblr with photographs he’d collected of homes he "fantasized" about living in rather than the "apartment that I had in Brooklyn." Cabins in seemingly abandoned landscapes; tiny homes off the grid; a rough-hewn A-frame in a snowscape, all available on an endless scroll. The escapism was evident, if ironic.

Initially, Cabin Porn was "nothing more than a scrapbook," he says. But Klein’s reverie proved zeitgeisty. Shortly after he launched the Tumblr, it grew to 350,00 followers and, within the first four years, had 10 million unique visitors. In 2015, he and friends produced the book Cabin Porn: Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere, a distillation of the blog published by Hachette imprint Voracious. "Inside each of us is a home ready to be built," the book promised.

The appeal of Cabin Porn might seem obvious at this moment—dreaming of simple living is ubiquitous. While social media has turned to an extremist embrace of tradwife influencers selling us a romanticized image of simple living, mainstream publications—this one included—peddle in cabin porn. Sleek photographs of cabins are less obviously politically charged than raw milk and the return of measles, but both share the same seductive appeal, the aesthetic of yearning: an escape from late capitalism’s ceaseless demands of labor and attention.

Cabin Porn is as much the product of an internet culture that makes users long for escape as it was the early aughts, where performative irony coexisted with earnest nostalgia. Much of that internet speak was developed on Tumblr where one could consume Cabin Porn in the same feed as other niche blogs that offered up everything from actual porn to I Love Charts, a Tumblr that shared, well, charts.

Its most distilled form, Cabin Porn was pure fantasy. Logging on to dream about permanently logging off is, perhaps, the internet’s cruelest trick.

In the 2010s, it seemed like nearly every popular niche Tumblr blog was turned into a book, from This is Why You’re Fat (photographs of food) to Hipster Puppies (puppies wearing Ray-Bans), Stuff White People Like (NPR, for example), and Garfield Minus Garfield (the famous comic strip sans the famous cat). Suffused with the millennial optimism of the Obama years, and a belief that the internet could be communal and fun, the ideal Tumblr, GQ quipped in 2010, was "compact, clearly delineated, devoid of investment, so perfectly internet." With its sly name and appealing photographs, Cabin Porn was almost a perfect encapsulation of the era.

Now, Klein says it’s hard "for me to remember what that [optimism] felt like."

As he excavates his feelings, it’s clear that in its most distilled form, Cabin Porn was pure fantasy, certainly for him but also, the consumers of its content. Logging on to dream about permanently logging off is, perhaps, the internet’s cruelest trick.   

For Klein, the dream of living in a cabin became a material reality in 2010 when he purchased 53 acres in upstate New York. The site included a cabin designed by interior designer Scott Newkirk. The cabin was so picturesque that New York Magazine published a 2007 photo spread of its reclaimed wood exterior and handmade windows. It’s no surprise that the cabin claimed the cover of the Cabin Porn book—it was the promise of Klein’s Tumblr made real; a small off-the-grid cabin to escape both internet and city for just $280,000 (that’s just over $400,000 today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator). He named it Beaver Brook and began hosting friends who, like Klein and his wife, Courtney, were experimenting with living off the grid for the weekend (the cabin had no electricity).

Klein’s cabin was, the New York Times wrote in a half-acerbic, half-fawning 2015 feature, "a millennial’s version of the Adirondack camps of the robber barons, the back-to-the-land movements and intentional communities of the 1950s and ’60s, and a combination of folk schools/artists’ residency." According to the paper, Beaver Brook was overburdened by the weight of history. Part of the cabin’s appeal is that it’s shot through with American myth; cabins have a unique place in American history, at once conjuring up the national lore of self-proclaimed exceptionalism, self-sufficiency, and humble simplicity.

Though the cabin feels uniquely American, it was imported by immigrants. The first log cabin was likely built in New Sweden, located in the Delaware River Valley, in the 17th century. Part of Sweden’s short-lived effort to colonize the Americas, the log cabin would have been a blip in America’s history if not for German and Scotch-Irish immigrants, for whom the humble cabin was effectively low-cost living. As the United States expanded, pushing westward, the cabin did too, forever intertwining the structure with the fiction of American perseverance.  

Abraham Lincoln was famously born in a one-room cabin in 1809, evidence, particularly in his post-assassination canonization, that even the poorest of Americans could attain the most powerful office if they simply tried hard enough. The cabin in rural Central Kentucky was, by the time of his death in 1865, long since gone, but its symbolic value lingered, architectural proof that Honest Abe was as humble as his roots.

If Lincoln’s cabin represents a foundational American myth of boundless opportunity, then Laura Ingalls Wilder’s cabin carries with it an intertwined history: rugged individualism. Born in Pepin, Wisconsin, Wilder’s birthplace served as inspiration for the Ingalls’s home in Little House in the Big Woods. In Wilder’s fictions, the cabin is a place where the nuclear family is made stronger by architectural modesty. While Wilder’s cabin was infused with a deeply conservative view of America, Henry David Thoreau’s was a space to resist modernity and "live deliberately," finding truths in nature. He famously wrote Walden, recounting "two years, two months, and two days" he’d spent at Walden Pond. The book was a heady mix of transcendentalism’s emphasis on self-reliance, the moralizing purity of nature, and civil disobedience.

These three cabins have all been reconstructed, and tourists flock to them eager to find authenticity in humility (Lincoln’s "symbolic birth cabin," as it’s called, is even housed in a shrine). In our postmodern world where our selves have been fragmented by technology, the cabin’s promise of simplicity feels irresistible. But that is the fiction of the cabin; the reality isn’t quite so romantic. Lincoln’s birthplace no longer exists because it was understood to be a temporary structure; a roof until poverty passed. Wilder’s rugged individualism was fueled by federal farm loans and, eventually, land stolen from Native Americans. And, as Kathryn Schultz wrote about Walden, it was the "original cabin porn," a "fantasy about domestic life divorced from living in the woods."