Log cabins often pop up during searches for holiday homes, weekend cottages, or hot tub holidays.

Compared to the general occurrence looking at main residences, log cabins seem to have a greater prevalence in tourism related homes. Why is this?

Favourable prices, quick construction periods, easy maintenance, high value for money ratio? Or is it the special feeling connected to a holiday in a log cabin, the smell of nature, the natural environment, the escape from the artificial live in the cities to a rusty, country style home to bond with mother nature for a short holiday period to give the souls some food?

It’s most probably a mixture of all: the owner of the holiday cabin and his customers enjoy their very own set of advantages.

One might even be tempted to attribute the rising market share of log cabins as residential buildings to the holiday experiences that many home-owners might once have had in a wooden log cabin. Because there is also no doubt that these holiday guests tend to come back, and that indicates that their experience of spending some days or even weeks in a log cabin must have been a pleasant one.

A short history of wooden log cabins

The first known historic examples of log cabins reach back nearly 5000 years into the past to the Bronze Age, where, of course, log cabins had been constructed with whole round logs. In a mostly wooded land, the inhabitants would have to clear the area from trees growing there first, and they would at the same time assemble their first building materials that way. Not only practical, but this building material would also be a perfect protection against intruders as well as the cold. Gaps between the logs were filled with dry moss, flax, or clay.

In Western – and Middle Europe this was a favourite way of building permanent homes, and later on log cabins became the favourite homes in northern regions where there was still enough wood, because the Romans with their hunger for wood to build castles and ships did not go there.

Another feature that was most welcome especially in cold regions like Northern Europe, Northern America, and Northern Asia was, of course, the very excellent thermal insulation capabilities of timber as a building material.

So, timber has since had its strong position as a building material in many northern countries.

Modern log cabins are produced in factories with quality assurance

Log cabins built from whole stems, round logs are actually the exception today. Nowadays mostly cut logs with smooth, even surfaces are used to construct log cabins. They could rather be called planks, beams, joists, bars or just simply timber. Nevertheless, the principle of their construction building walls up from the ground with layers of horizontally applied planks, and connected by stable wood-joints at the corners without the need for screws, nails or any metal at all has been maintained as a simple, fast, yet very sturdy and durable construction method.

As a big plus, these planks can be manufactured very accurately with computer aided machinery, and we even use carefully kiln-dried logs to make sure that all building parts will keep their shapes perfectly even when in log cabins of other manufacturers who use fresh wood, drying wood will lead to shrinking which may lead to cracks, or even tension-induced gaps in weight bearing parts. Using pre-dried timber, we can guarantee, that the logs keep their exact shape even after the heating inside of the log cabin begins. That way we have no problems at all, guaranteeing a five-year warranty on all of our log cabins.

Spare money with low energy bills in log cabins

The days when log cabins had to be insulated with dry moss between the logs are long over. We can provide planks with double tongue and groove connections for all our inhabitable log cabins providing 100% tight walls, and, of course, double glazing is also a standard.

Once you have understood the very simple principle of building log cabins from timber, which is a highly insulating natural material, you will ask yourself, how it could become so widespread to build houses from a heavily heat conducting material like building blocks first and then make a second and third step of insulating this heat conducting construction inside and outside, instead of using a readily available highly sturdy, durable and thermally insulating material right from the start as the main building material. Maybe this has become popular because really during the times of the British fleet built from wooden ships, timber was indeed in short supply.

Now, we have no shortage of dense and finely grained timber from Northern spruce right at our doorsteps, and we plan to let you participate on our advantage.

Log cabins provide a favourable living atmosphere, and they have a very small ecological footprint

At least this is true for our log cabins with our favourite timber, the Northern spruce growing right at our doorstep. We don’t need to ship in „Red Cedar“ from the other side of the Atlantic, no tropical wood species. We built our factories here in the north because we have plenty of timber here that is suited just fine for bedroom log cabins, summer houses, garden saunas, carports, garden sheds, and many kinds of wooden buildings.

To go back to the reasons why log cabins are so popular as holiday cottages, and why the market share of inhabitable wooden log cabins as main residences is constantly growing: we think that the comfortable living atmosphere in wooden buildings profiting from balanced temperatures and moistures, due to the capabilities of wood that takes up and damps out moisture, a breathing material that even filters out odours like cigarette-smoke, pollen or air-pollution and provides a healthy environment for patients with allergies or asthma, might be one of the main reasons for its growing popularity.

Wooden log cabins are built from a renewable resource, need comparably little additional insulation and thus possess an ecological footprint much smaller than buildings made from other materials.

Combine this with a very competitive cost/value ratio, and you possibly have the main reasons that make more and more people want to spend their holidays, or even their whole lives in wooden log cabins.

For any questions, please contact us or call Oliver at 020 3807 0369!