Unyoked Review: Inside The Off-Grid Cabins Designed To Help You Switch Off

I don’t particularly like birthdays. Or rather, I don’t like the peculiar attention economy that surrounds them: the plans to make, messages to answer and vague pressure to spend the day doing something sufficiently birthday-ish. So this year, I celebrated mine by becoming almost entirely unreachable.

Instead of sitting at home waiting for midnight, I spent three nights at Etta, one of Unyoked’s off-grid cabins in the Sussex countryside. Founded by twin brothers Chris and Cam Grant in 2017, the Australian-born company specialises in small, self-contained cabins designed to get city dwellers out into nature, with UK locations spanning the South Downs, North Norfolk and the Black Mountains in Wales. And it’s expanding: a 10-year partnership with Forestry England will see Unyoked cabins appear in pockets of woodland across the country, too.

It’s an increasingly familiar proposition: I’ve written before about the rise of the digital detox and even tried another off-grid cabin escape myself. But Unyoked’s approach is refreshingly non-preachy. Here’s how.

Unyoked cabins are immersed in nature.

Getting There

Our retreat from London began at London Bridge, followed by a train into Sussex and a taxi with Colin, a local taxi driver recommended by Unyoked, brimming with laughs and recommendations. As the roads narrowed into those notoriously slender Sussex country lanes, hemmed in by hedges and greenery, Colin filled us in on the area. By the time we reached the farm where Etta is located, London felt pleasingly distant.

Cars can only go as far as a dedicated parking area, with the final few minutes completed on foot. Unyoked grades your trek from here into the wilderness Nando’s style ahead of time: choose between mild, medium, spicy or extra spicy. At the car park, there’s also a wheelbarrow for luggage, and from there wooden posts lead the way to the cabin.

Etta is one of three black timber Unyoked cabins arranged around the fringes of a dome-shaped clearing on a privately owned farm near Dallington. You can see the others and occasionally hear their inhabitants, so this isn’t total wilderness. For friends travelling together but wanting separate spaces, the arrangement would be ideal. Travelling as a couple, I found myself wishing for just a little more isolation.

Inside, though, the outside world quickly recedes. Etta is compact and deliberately simple: a large bed wrapped on two sides by large picture windows, a small seating area, wood burner, kitchenette and bathroom with a hot shower and composting toilet. Scandi-ish timber, tactile blankets and muted greens soften the functional design, while a little deck out front gives you somewhere to sit and soak up the morning light.

Arriving at the tail end of the summer heatwave, the cabin was baking by the time we rocked up for the 3pm check-in. We flung open every window, took the provided picnic blanket outside and sat in the shade while a cross breeze slowly worked its way through. With nothing to check, nowhere to be, a book in my hands, phone signal dwindling and the sun on my skin, the tension started to melt out of my body and brain.

Unyoked may be off-grid, but beds are large and supremely comfortable. (Ruby, North Norfolk; @amslebrun)

Learning To Slow Down

Unyoked isn’t luxurious in the traditional sense. There are no fluffy robes, enormous bathtubs or minibars. Instead, these cabins provide everything required to make basic living surprisingly pleasant. The bed is large and extremely comfortable, with excellent blackout blinds; the shower is hot; there are proper hobs and a sizeable fridge, along with piece of equipment you need to cook and eat for a few days. Even the composting toilet proved thoroughly undramatic: essentially a normal loo minus the flush, plus sawdust (and a small air freshener spray; a nice touch).

But convenience has been gently dialled down, too. Tea is loose-leaf with a traditional whistling kettle; making coffee involves grinding the beans yourself before slowly brewing them. Meals require forethought: we planned our eating meticulously beforehand, but you always miss a sneaky snack. We also made space in our dining plan for a pub lunch, which equated to (happily) walking for two hours along narrow country roads and public footpaths when we headed towards Ashburnham for a Sunday roast at quaint local pub The Ash Tree; delicious.

With all the essentials taken care of, our days acquired a peculiar elasticity, stretching luxuriously ahead of us in the morning and then somehow disappearing once the coffee was ground, brewed and sipped, the breakfast was cooked and scoffed, the books thumbed through, the trees stared at, the day’s walk decided on. I had imagined I might tear through books, but I didn’t read significantly more than I would on a normal weekend; nature itself proved distracting. There were pheasants wandering confidently around the cabin’s clearing, birds and other wildlife providing a constant soundtrack and, on one walk, the tallest cows I have ever encountered, their towering legs dwarfing the fences containing them.

Most importantly, the feeling that something needed to be achieved over these three nights eventually faded. Everything happened slowly because there was no reason for it to happen quickly. That’s rather the point: research conducted by Unyoked and AllTrails found that time spent in the cabins was associated with reduced feelings of burnout and improved mental wellbeing. I can’t speak for the science after three nights in Sussex, but my brain certainly felt less noisy.

Kitchens come equipped with all of the essentials.

The Digital Detox (If You Want It)

There is no Wi-Fi at Unyoked’s cabins, and phone signal ranges from limited to nonexistent (also noted on each cabin’s profile page). Unyoked also provides a Brick, a small device that works with an app to temporarily block distracting apps on your phone, whether that’s social media or a game you’ve become particularly fond of. There are instructions showing how and encouraging you to use it, but nobody is checking.

That voluntariness is both Unyoked’s strength and, occasionally, its weakness. We brought a disposable camera so we wouldn’t need our phones for photographs and largely left them alone by choice. While I liked that there was no moral dimension to it, the cabin wasn’t totally equipped for those moments you do need a screen. Unyoked provides a recommended walk via Strava, for example, but no paper map of the cabin’s surrounding area. Without the relevant subscription to download the route in advance, and with barely any signal at the cabin, this was little use to us. It’s a strange wrinkle in an otherwise carefully considered off-grid experience. We ended up improvising with Google Maps whenever we managed to acquire a precious bar of reception, but it made us more reliant on screens than we wanted to be.

Picture windows bring the outside in. (Elin, Brecon Beacons National Park; @dpc_photography)

The Great Indoors, Outdoors

Unyoked isn’t camping (perhaps it’s closer to glamping), nor does it really pretend to be. You’re immersed in the countryside without having to get particularly gritty about it. Solar panels provide power, water use is consciously limited and the loo doesn’t flush, but there’s still a proper mattress, blackout blinds, a hot shower and somewhere cold to keep the bacon.

For people who think they dislike camping, or simply don’t own several hundred pounds’ worth of camping paraphernalia, Unyoked cabins occupy an appealing middle ground. You can spend the day walking through fields and woodland, then shut the door on the insects and sleep in an actual bed.

The Final Word

Three nights felt simultaneously ample and nowhere near enough. By the end, I hadn’t undergone a dramatic transformation; I simply wasn’t stressed. There were no plans to coordinate, messages I owed anybody an immediate response to and no pressure to celebrate my birthday in a particular way. On our final morning, we cooked breakfast, packed up and wheelbarrowed our belongings back towards reality. Even on the train home, we resisted switching our phones fully back on until London drew closer.

Then the city got loud again. Almost immediately, my brain began rewiring itself for normal life: things to do, people to reply to, plans to make, little mental lists assembling themselves almost faster than I could notice them. Alas. Thus is a life with responsibilities – but it really is a delight to escape them for a while.

BOOK IT

Unyoked cabins start from £139 per night, two night minimum stay. | unyoked.co