One Night in a Tiny Cabin Designed for Remote Work in the Mountains of Southern California

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

The idea of a "work cabin" felt odd when I saw them start to bubble up around 2020. They seemed like sparse, melancholy rooms for one, where a weary employee might toil over spreadsheets, hop on Zoom calls with devastating lighting, and hustle to meet company quotas. But I also had a more sanguine vision of a woodsy hut nestled sweetly in the pines. There was a meadow, maybe butterflies. It was worlds away from modern life’s lockstep pace and the anxieties it induces, the kind of place Henry David Thoreau hid out to uncover the "essential facts of life." What a luxury.

With the seismic paradigm shift in work culture caused by the pandemic and, as a result, many high-rise office buildings waving goodbye to corporate America, more than a few prefab startups are making a bet that you can retreat into nature and generate returns. As Dwell’s design news editor, I’ve seen it firsthand: Find your spiritual center, send better emails, purport many of the pitches I’ve fielded for cabins designed for remote work in recent years. Some are tiny structures that can be plopped in your backyard, creating an effective illusion for separating home and office life. Some are more like sheds, and others are prefabs that can be purchased turnkey. At the other end of the spectrum are concepts for rentable retreats that take remote work at its most literal sense. One such is Find Sanctuary, a startup that pitched me a stay at its pilot cabin situated in Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains that, according to the company’s website, is "a remedy to the noise."

Looking into it, Find Sanctuary’s tiny cabin leaned toward the promise of the woodsy hut I had imagined. Less oil-burning candle vibes and more sleek Airbnb weekend escape, it had huge windows with mountain views, a deck with a sunken hot tub, and an isolated setting that granted access to the region’s hikes and watering holes. But it also had all the tech my job requires, namely strong Wi-Fi and a way to make coffee. Could it go toe-to-toe with my daily WFH situation, a breakfast nook entangled with domestic duties? Could I apply myself purposefully here and simultaneously reap the mind-clearing benefits that natural splendor removed from civilization, at least somewhat, can offer? This was Find Sanctuary’s promise, so I decided to test the limitations of staying connected while getting out of town.

Sunday

Morning: Around 11 a.m., my wife, dog, and I meander down the coast on 101 toward Los Angeles. Driving through Ventura County, wildflowers and green hills are glowing under a gray sky. The ocean to our right is calm and steel blue. 

With check in at 3 p.m. and plenty of daylight to work with, we peruse a menu of activities provided by Find Sanctuary as part of their digital concierge service that includes where to eat, hike, and grocery shop near the property. We love the outdoors, with notches on our belt including Yosemite’s Clouds Rest trail and more than one overnight Northern California kayak excursion, so we pick a five-ish-mile round trip trail to a hot spring not far from the cabin. Easy. We’ll knock that out and be checked in before sunset.

Afternoon: Highway 18, the road that takes you from the San Bernardino Valley into the mountains, is harrowing, and that’s without snow. As we begin our ascent, looking ahead, its four lanes are a strand of endless thread stitched into the mountainside, burying into the cliff on some turns and looping out over trellises on others. This is one of the roads to Big Bear, a popular ski destination among Southern Californians for its proximity to Los Angeles. Should we forget, the swift speed of traffic reminds us we are newcomers here. But taking it slow allows us to stave off nausea and catch views, which are only more spectacular the higher we climb, given a gauzy glow by the smog hanging over the valley.

Thirty minutes later, we crest the ridge and arrive at a series of small mountain towns with scattered pines, a log cabin general store advertising sundries and fishing tackle, and woodsy homes to match. At 70-plus degrees outside, it’s warmer than it has been here, but evidence of the 10-year storm that dropped more than 100 inches of snow in late February and early March, trapping some residents for weeks, lingers, with patches of dirty snow in shade spots along the road.

Cruising past alpine residences still thawing from a cold winter didn’t give us the sense we were headed in the direction of a hike with a hot spring. But like turning a page, we emerge from the forested setting into a treeless landscape scattered with boulders and chaparral. A little more winding and we dead end at a closed gate, where four other cars are parked around a bridge crossing a river. This is our trailhead. We hop to it behind a group of four who have hiking poles. Are those necessary?

After a couple of hours of wandering down a gently sloped canyon, our dog, Lou, is not doing great. There’s heavy panting and constant shade breaks. Fair enough, it’s warm out, he’s now 10, and not the three year old that would trot up and back on trails, covering twice the distance my wife and I would. Eventually we arrive at a cliff and can see our destination, a lush oasis at the bottom of a canyon that looks farther away than we want it to. A couple who’s on their way back fills us in. "Yeah it’s usually two hours in, three hours out," they say. Good to know. We should have done a little more homework.

It’s just one more mile down to the spring, but with loose dirt on a severe incline, is easily one of the most challenging trails the two of us have faced. (We could use some hiking poles.) We look at Lou, who’s now lying in the shade of a bush, legs fully outstretched, eyes closed tight, wishing he were anywhere else. This is the moment in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air when the zealous millionaires foolishly push to Everest’s summit in spite of a storm only to meet their and their sherpas’ deaths. But we have plans later for fajitas and a campfire at the cabin, so we choose life, cut our losses, and head back to the car.