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Last fall I was in the market to buy my first home. I had one nonnegotiable criterion: it had to have a garage. Early in the search, I sent a promising listing to my mother, who lives in California. She noted that the garage looked small and unlikely to fit my truck. “That’s OK,” I said. “The truck isn’t going in there.” “What do you need a garage for then?” she asked, confused. “Nobody in Colorado parks their car in the garage,” I explained. “We all park on the street.” “But what do you put in the garage?” she pressed. I shrugged. “Bikes, gear, stuff like that.” Later, on a ride, I recounted the exchange to my friend Melanie, who, along with her husband, owns a house with a highly enviable garage (two-car, attached) packed to the eaves with bikes and camping equipment. “My mother thinks we’re very strange,” I told her as we pedaled along. “Have you ever parked your car in your garage?” “Of course not,” she laughed. “What a waste of a garage!”

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In case you aren’t familiar with the history of the internet’s obsession with cabin porn, here’s a quick lesson: it started, as all good things do, on Tumblr. More specifically, it was the brainchild of Zach Klein (CEO of the home-design magazine Dwell, cofounder of the kids crafting website DIY.org, early cofounder of Vimeo—you get the idea) and his friends when they were twentysomethings looking to get out of New York City. “I never intended to move to New York City,” says Klein, who’s now based in San Francisco. “My idea of being successful was being outside all the time.” In the late 2000s, after following what he calls “a pretty conventional arc” (get a job, meet a girl, settle down), Klein went looking for a place to get away. He eventually scored some land in Sullivan County, a sleepy green patch in the Catskills of New York, where he and his friends could go to spend time in nature. Soon after, they started a Tumblr feed called Cabin Porn, where they would reblog about homes that inspired their own prospective builds. In 2009, Klein decided to make the private blog public—and it exploded. In 2015, along with writer Steven Leckart and photographer Noah Kalina, he published Cabin Porn, a collection of dwellings that influenced his construction process. Four years later, he and the travel writer Freda Moon released a second edition, Cabin Porn: Inside, to answer what Klein says was one of the most common reader questions from the first edition: What does it look like inside? While researching both books and his previous blog, Klein looked at “tens of thousands” of cabins. While we’re stuck at home, we couldn’t help but create our own list of the dream spots we wish we were hunkered down in right now.

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