Cabinrules
A magazine about cabin life, and the unwritten rules of it.
Cabinrules is a magazine about cabin life. It is a celebration of the way cabins are lived in, by the people who own them, in whatever season they are lived in.
The premise is in the wordmark. There are rules. We did not invent them. They are already there in any cabin worth the drive: the screen door slams, the first to wake makes the coffee, the chair in the corner that no one sits in stays where it is. We have written some of them down. Most of them are not the kind of rule you would find on a sign. They are the kind that you only notice you have been following when someone new visits and breaks one and the cabin reminds you, gently, that this is not how things go here.
We profile cabins. We send writers and photographers to spend a Tuesday with the people who live there, and we write down what we see, and we run the photographs in the largest format we can. We run essays from contributors who keep cabins of their own. We keep a count of the rules.
Products appear in these pages because we like them, because they fit, and because the people we profile use them. We do not run anything that does not earn its way into the photograph. The bowl is in the kitchen because the family eats from it on Sundays.
Contributors
Editor
- Reed LytleThe Catskills, New York
Reed edits the magazine from a 1920s lakeside cabin in the Catskills that he and his wife are slowly returning to plumb. He writes the standfirsts and keeps the Rules.
Writers
- Hollis Ware
Hollis writes about water. He grew up summering on Lake Vermilion and now lives there year-round in a fishing cabin his grandfather built from a kit in 1962.
- June Ahrens
June writes about food and gathering. She runs a small summer kitchen residency program from a stone cabin in the Blue Ridge foothills and has not bought a new cast-iron pan since 1998.
- Theo Beasley
Theo writes about slow time. His cabin sits on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island and gets exactly four full hours of direct sun in December. He has watched all of them.
- Margery Lin
Margery writes about the things in cabins - the chairs, the bowls, the hooks - and the people who make them. Her own cabin is in northern Vermont and contains exactly seven pieces of furniture, all signed.
Photographers
- Annika Reuter
Annika photographs interiors, primarily for shelter magazines. She works in available light and almost always shoots in the hour before noon.
- Sam Petralia
Sam photographs cabins from the outside in - approaches, porches, weather. He travels with a 1986 Wagoneer and rarely uses a tripod.
Cabinrules is published online from a 1920s lakeside cabin in the Catskills. It is a quarterly in spirit, occasional in fact.