The coolest idea ever!
What an incredible tiny home! Well its an art installation and a cabin! And a floating cabin as well.
This artfully designed see-though cabin design is the work of Elise Morin and Florent Albinet. It is
modelled on the remote cabin built by American author Henry David Thoreau in the mid 19th
century that was built in the woods around Walden Pond in Massachusetts and its called the
Walden Raft. Though it looks like a sweet little tiny home to us!
You can visit this amazing cabin and experience for yourself the seclusion and natural environment
that you become immersed in. It is situated on Lac de Gayme in the Auvergne region of central
France. The idea behind this tiny home is to reflect on the book Life in the Woods that is loved as a
study on self-sufficiency and the virtues of a simpler country life.
The tiny hut follows the proportions of Thoreaus hut – with a 10 square meter footprint and a height of four meters. The
walls and the pitched roof are made up of sections of pine and acrylic glass, which are mounted on
top of polyethylene floats.
Incredible, this cabin just blends and becomes part of the environment
and beautiful nature that surrounds it.
Visitors can move the cabin along a cable strung from the shore to an anchor in the middle of the
lake by rotating a central reel in the hut. So you can really get a feel of the beauty of this cabin in
its environment.
“Buoyancy and mobility make this shelter a space that is neither too near nor too far from human
society” said the designer Morin. “I needed to find a solution to express interaction between interior
and exterior”
Part of the wonder of this tiny cabin is when the designers introduced transparent acrylic glass
panels to the original design, which creates the amazing effect of levitating planks of wood where
they are set into its surface. Morin also describes the tiny cabin project as “something at the
crossroads of art and architecture” that she says addresses questions about autonomy, isolation
and solitude, but also contemplation and enlarged perspectives. An amazing project which has
produced a beautiful floating cabin that you can visit and feel part of nature when you step aboard.
The lake where this cabin is located is an artificial lake created from a bog in 1983, and
serendipitously sits at the same latitude of Thoreau’s original cabin. Elegant and beautiful indeed!
