Charming Log Cabins Are Built Just The Way They Were Hundreds of Years Ago

Creating Beautiful and Practical Cabins

Design consulting firm and builder L'atelier Idealand creates beautiful and practical cabins for many uses. For those who want a cabin of their own to stay in when they're on vacation, for a home or for tourism. The company believes that a coherent project is achieved through precise planning and strategy in relation to the surrounding land. So they do a lot of work before the building even begins to assess the proper placement of the building and the style of the building too. They do a detailed diagnosis for the positioning and development of the home with the client, guiding them every step of the way. Since they are based in France, they call their cabins Cabanes which is the French word for cabin. They build the cabins with inspiration from the cabins they see on their travels to the far Northern places in Canada and the United States where log cabins have been built for hundreds of years. They follow the traditional building methods of Scandinavian builders, and they're also inspired by the log cabins built by Canadian settlers in the early days of immigration. Cabins for communities or individuals, ranging from 5 m2 to 40 m2, which is 50 square feet to 430 square feet. The nice thing about their cabins is that they are easily built and removable, without foundations, and they are always perfectly integrated into the landscape. People use these cabins for recreational purposes as well as home offices, guest suites, rental suites, workshops, studios, saunas and more.

Inspired by Traditional Techniques

In Alaska, the designers were very inspired by a 20 m2 cabin they built together with an axe and a handsaw. As you can imagine it would have been fairly challenging to build a log cabin like this themselves. They use natural Larch or Douglas fir species since this is what is most available to them and it is a great type of wood for homes and cabins. The price per square meter for a log cabin will all depend on the style, size and finishes of the particular build, but their log cabins can range anywhere from 650,00 € to 1,500,00 €. The wood-framed cabins, on the other hand, will be around 350,00 € to 1,000.00 € per m2 which would make good sheds, saunas or toilets. Stéphane Guist'hau is the manager of Atelier Idealand since 2009, and the company was based on his 16 years of experience in the Far North of Canada and the United States. By seeing lots of tourist sites during travels, he was able to bring some design inspiration back to France in addition to his engineering skills bringing it together into a business. The first cabin he built when he was 20 in Alaska he lived in for 4.5 months and studied the skills and the design ideas for building great log cabins.

The Art of Craftsmanship

You can see here in the photos of these awesome real log cabins just how beautifully and expertly they are created. They're created with the engineering of modern times but with the appearance and charm of the cabins of the past. They use full round logs that have been individually hand peeled and then shaped into the forms that stack perfectly on top of one another to create a perfectly insulated shelter. You can see the process they undergo when building a log cabin in the video on their website, which shows them cutting the logs with chainsaws and smoothing them down with sanders. It's a very impressive process that involves a lot of hands-on work and precision. It gives you a true appreciation for these absolutely beautiful buildings.