This Tiny Red Cabin Has a Lockbox for Your Phone

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Project Details:

Location: County Westmeath, Ireland

Architect: Studio Bucky

Footprint: 215 square feet

Photographer: Jasmine Hughes / @_jasminehughes_

From the Architect: "When Irish architect Alexander Buckeridge met Rosanna Irwin in New York in 2023, the conversation kept returning to the same gap: almost no small retreats existed that were both genuinely design-led and genuinely restful. Irwin had founded Samsú the year before, building a platform for nature-based stays in rural Ireland. Buckeridge runs Studio Bucky, a Brooklyn practice focused on atmosphere and material experience at an intimate scale. The brief was simple: a small cabin where guests could genuinely switch off, designed with enough care that the architecture did the work. The result is CUCU—a 215-square-foot off-grid cabin set within 350 acres of Irish countryside in County Westmeath, about an hour outside Dublin. Its exterior is clad in red-stained timber shingles, a color drawn directly from the corrugated metal roofs and painted agricultural outbuildings scattered across this landscape. From a distance it reads as a deliberate presence rather than an interruption—a structure that belongs to where it sits.

"The plan is tight and the section is tall, a logic drawn from Ireland’s tower houses: the medieval stone structures that punctuate the rural midlands, compact in footprint and organized around verticality. The compression makes the height feel earned. The tightness of the footprint pushes life upward—a ladder leads to a mezzanine sleeping level, where a circular window frames the surrounding canopy. Each level opens a different relationship with the land outside. Inside, the bold exterior gives way to something more considered. Plywood linings, terra-cotta tiles, warm timber, and copper detailing build a layered interior where the same red that colors the shingles outside reappears in the window frames and floor tiling, threading the exterior logic through the whole. On the ground floor, a custom roll-top copper bath sits at the center of the plan—the anchor of a daily ritual rather than an amenity to be photographed. A private sauna occupies the far end.

"On arrival, guests receive an analogue kit: film camera, cassette player, phone lockbox, a hand-drawn map of the land. The cabin has already set the terms. The kit simply confirms them."