Inside America’s small, perfectly formed ‘tourist cabins’

On a hot July afternoon in the small town of North Adams, Massachusetts, I walk with two men past a motel pool, through the woods, and across a pedestrian drawbridge over the Hoosic River. It wobbles as we move. We walk down a dirt path, past a Philip Grausman sculpture of a head, and scramble up an embankment into a clearing. What we see is a cabin, sitting alone, surrounded by the rolling Berkshire Hills. It’s minimalist, with smooth pine walls and a doorframe-sized passage cutting through it, lit warm with hidden lights. If you walk right through it and turn around, you see the home in full effect: its large windows, bedroom, kitchen and deck. It’s peaceful in there, and surprisingly luxurious.

The men are developers, Eric Kerns and Ben Svenson. With partners including the founder of Brooklyn magazine and the bassist of the indie band Wilco, they own the motel we passed, Tourists, a trendy take on a 1950s motor lodge. Opened six years ago, it successfully Brooklyn-ified a slice of old Americana, attracting city hipsters who craved good coffee and urban amenities among the mountains, within a four-hour drive from New York. 

Now they’re looking to update another, less well-known, aspect of Americana: the tourist cabin. In the early 20th century, more than 400,000 such cabins dotted the country, built to facilitate the road trip, a very American invention. The cabin we’ve come to see is a prototype: the team behind Tourists hope to manufacture them here and send them out across the country under a franchise model.

After the nation’s first federal highway funding law in 1916, campgrounds began to spring up alongside the expanding road network. The next logical step was to build small cabins, mostly unfurnished. Sometimes called cabin camps or cottage courts, these shacks gave tired drivers a place to stay that looked and felt a bit like a home. The 1996 book The Motel in America describes a typical 1920s scene: a guest pays a dollar to rent a cabin empty, and 75 cents more for a mattress, sheets and pillows, with a bucket of water from the hydrant outside.

Through the decade these cabins became more permanent, and more refined, perhaps with a petrol pump and a shared lunch counter. Existing inn owners got inspired, too, building a few cabins out back to expand without major cost. By 1933, Architectural Record magazine was calling cabin-camp construction one of the Great Depression’s few booming building sectors. “The money trickles steadily in and rolls in during the summer. Your overhead is low. Your wife does the cooking, your daughter makes the beds, your son tends the gas pumps.”

The boom, however, didn’t last. The cabins often weren’t winterised. They deteriorated quickly. Better-made chain motels arrived after world war two, promising consistency from coast to coast all under one roof, and the cabins disintegrated into the landscape. Now, you only see vestiges, tucked along interstate roads.

This is rejecting all that tiny-house compromise, where you’re climbing up into a three-and-a-half foot bed

Kerns and Svenson had the idea for cabins before they knew this history. Initially, it was their take on a trend already established in Europe and elsewhere, and on America’s tiny home obsession, which took off in the early days of Instagram. But Svenson says that when they learnt about tourist cabins from a neighbour in North Adams, “that was our window into thinking, oh this is a real business. If you take the inflation adjusted dollars, those cabins were about $72,000 each in 1931. They weren’t wispy buildings.”

We walk into the cabin, designed with the local JZJN Architecture studio, and Kerns shows me how the bedroom fits a king-sized bed with space on both sides. “This is rejecting all that tiny-house compromise, where you’re climbing up into a three-and-a-half foot bed,” he says. “All that cleverness is not what this is about.” There’s a luxurious bathroom, with a skylight, and a separate kitchen. They’re mobile homes, technically, just two souped-up trailers on wheels, which are easy to move or make disappear.

“Those old cabins are atrophying in the woods,” Svenson tells me, “Ours has a 99 per cent recyclable steel foundation. It’s made to go away when it’s done.” The unit we’re in is called the Starling. Next they’ll start to build the Robin, which has a third connected unit, with a full living room and extra toilet and sink.

North Adams is a former industrial mecca that feels haunted by its once glorious past. It’s in the northern tip of The Berkshires, Massachusetts’ far western region known for rolling hills, old money, and a hippie-meets-Puritan charm, home of Edith Wharton, Norman Rockwell, America’s famed outdoor music venue Tanglewood, and one of its longest-running wellness resorts, Canyon Ranch. Although the Southern Berkshires is more developed, North Adams is improving, thanks mostly to Mass MOCA, a contemporary art complex in an old print works, which turns 25 this year. Tourists has brought some life back to town, too, and it helps that the wealthy neighbouring Williamstown is home of the Clark Art Institute, another world famous museum.

Kerns and Svenson have bet heavily on the town. They’ve built a campus of sorts by acquiring and puzzling together more than 40 properties in and around it, some used as self-contained rentals for larger groups. After seeing the cabin, we walk a little further to the long-vacant Blackinton Mill, some sections of which date from the 1850s. They bought it in 2016, initially intending to turn it into a 50-room hotel but will now use it to manufacture the cabins. “Can it be a building that makes a thousand hotel rooms instead of 50?” asks Kerns. They admit to having capitalised on decades of low demand and prices in town — the mill cost them $225,000 and Kerns says he bought a nearby house on auction in a snowstorm for $5,000.

Their bet on a renaissance of the tourist cabin is still in early days. They hope to sell the Starling for about $200,000, the Robin about $270,000. Buyers — or “partners” in the company jargon — will then also pay 15 per cent of revenues for the duration of their licensing agreement (typically about 10 years). In return the partners will get all the cabin furnishings, from mattresses and sheets to cutlery and coffee makers, help from an opening “task force”, marketing and most importantly bookings through a central website and call centre. The partners themselves, meanwhile, are contractually obliged to maintain certain standards of quality. 

Kerns and Svenson say they’ve had more than 50 inquiries from potential partners. They’re cagey about specifics but say one is from a guy who owns a goat farm in Asheville, North Carolina. “He wants to bring people there for agricultural tourism, and introduce their families to goats,” Svenson says. “He also wants an amazing hotel. He doesn’t want it as much as he wants to take care of goats. That symbiosis, where we’re as passionate about hospitality as he is about goats? That’s fun.”

That night, I stay at the motel which, like the cabins, seems unassuming at first. Turning off busy Route 2 into the parking lot, across from a supermarket, all you see is the wooden walls — all doors, no windows — and the corrugated metal roofs of the long, single-storey accommodation blocks. Step inside, though, and you are immediately immersed in the view: the entire back wall is glass, overlooking the forest out back, not the street out front. I’m reminded of comments the developers made earlier: “We always said with Tourists, let’s not talk about it — let’s just open it, and let people see what it is,” Kerns said. “Underpromise and overdeliver,” Svenson agreed.

Settling in, everything is where it’s meant to be; the lighting is warm, the beds somehow soft and firm, there’s a private outdoor shower. The in-house music channel, “Tourists Radio”, is a hipster low-fi relaxation playlist perfectly tuned for every time of day.

There’s a swimming pool and a restaurant, the Airport Rooms, in a renovated house next door, with good cocktails and New York-level food. Breakfast, drinks and all-day snacks are served in the Lodge, where there’s live music on the night I visit. With its wooden walls and leather sofas, I had worried it would feel like sitting in Instagram but it actually feels quite intimate, full of guests and locals.

“There’s a generational transition happening in the Berkshires right now,” Kerns had told me. “That traditional older audience, who are buying candles and seeing James Taylor at Tanglewood? They’re disappearing at a clip. We were gratified that by opening this hotel, it felt like [younger] people had a home, a place to stay now that feels good to them, and isn’t that Ye Olde New England thing.”

Now they are hoping their cabins can carry the same sense of reinvention nationwide. They say they haven’t committed to any of the inquiries yet, and won’t until the autumn, starting with just three or four locations. Whether this grand idea takes off, we can only wait and see.

Lilah Raptopoulos is the host of the FT Weekend podcast Life and Art

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