This Micro Cabin Rotates 360º for the Perfect View
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Telmo is the designer and creator of the Cabana Adriana on the Cebo Verde Campsite in Northern Portugal. His idea got inspired by a small traditional wooden hut on wheels that cows would pull aside shepherds, for them to sleep inside at night. Telmo's father himself had bought one that is nearly 120 years old and which he still has today. Inspired, Telmo wanted to be innovative by recreating a similar cabin, just converting the movement from vertical to horizontal. Hence came came the idea of creating a cabin that turns around itself on the spot instead of being pulled by cows.
After showing his first drawings of the cabin to his cousin, a carpenter, they concluded that it was possible to do it. Keeping just the rough designs Telmo had made, they went with the flow during the construction of the Micro Cabin and made a detailed plan of it only after having built it. The biggest challenge was to design the rotating mechanism underneath the cabin. They did one first version of the mechanism together with a friend who was a mechanic – it did not function very well, but it worked and was a good start. With that mechanism you could rotate the cabin through a handle from the inside. As the cabin is fairly heavy, the handle broke down and can now only be rotated by hand from the outside. However, Telmo says that the cabin is only a prototype and that they learned a lot of things in the construction process. He already has the plans for the final version of it and the rotating mechanism – 3D plans designed by an architect and a mechanical engineer.
The cabin has been built with very simple and ecological materials: wood, cork and black slates. Cork is a cheap and very accessible material, as Portugal is the largest producer of cork in the world. There are four centimeters of cork that insulate the cabin as well as the door and the big window reflects the UV rays. For the final version of the cabin, they planned ten centimeters of cork for insulation and bigger tiles that will replace the slates.
Telmo likes that the cabin can offer a different experience for their guests, who can expose the cabin towards the landscape they like more or avoid the sun when it is strongest in summer. He says it is a nice place to stay at for a couple of days. The fact that the cabin is very small should also be an incentive for people to go outside more and explore the surroundings.
This being said, the inside of Cabana Adriana is kept very simple, yet nice and functional. There are a bed, a foldable table, few storage boxes and a floor out of cork. One light outside, another one inside on the ceiling and one plug to charge electronic devices. The electricity is connected by a cable that leads from the outside of the cabin to a bigger plug in a house beside it. In order to avoid having to plug out the cable each time one wants to rotate the cabin, they are planning to install the plug underneath the rotating mechanism of the new version of the cabin.
The bed is convertible into a small sofa thanks to its three-modular mattress – it can be simply folded up, just like the wooden plank underneath it that supports it. The foldable table offers just enough space for two people and either the sofa or the wooden storage boxes put vertically can serve as seats. As the space inside is limited, they decided not to set up anything to cover the window. According to Telmo, this also gives a nice feeling of being connected with the outside permanently, making the small area feeling much bigger than it actually is.
“When you design a Tiny Cabin, a Micro Lodge, it's a very personal thing”, Telmo says. “You have to think: What do YOU like? What inspires you? You will build your own personal structure. You're not going to build a house for a family, you're going to build something YOU love, something you like, inspired by yourself, by your environment and by the things you like to do. And so that's it, it will reflect yourself, it's much of the Lego-spirit.”.
