Author: ruth.chapman5@gmail.com

Sustainability

Wine tasting cabin breaks in East Sussex

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 10 November 2023

Wine tasting and glamping breaks in East Sussex

Tours and tastings at internationally acclaimed vineyards not far from the cabin

Exploring the Sussex Wine Region, from the cabin.

You may well have heard of Ridgeview, Nyetimber or Bolney Wine Estate – they have put Sussex on the international wine map – but there are many other vineyards in the area who are taking advantage of the incredible terroir and climate to produce stunning wines.

The good news for our guests is that many of these wonderful vineyards are right on our doorstep, or just a short drive away. They are often open year-round for visitors interested in tours and tastings. A lot of them have restaurants too – fine wine, fine food and fine company sounds like the perfect way to spend a day!

The secret to Sussex’s success

The (not so) secret behind their success of Sussex’s wine is the terroir and climate. The vines thrive on the diverse mix of clay, sand and limestone and benefit from the relatively mild weather and low rainfall. The proximity to the sea means less extreme temperatures, so the grapes are kept warm and ripen slowly, absorbing all those minerals to develop the most exceptional flavours. The perfect climate has lead to a profusion of vineyards – just check out this interactive map!

With land that is very similar to Champagne, many vintners opt to produce grape varieties like Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier, each of which make excellent sparkling wine but also allow for some rather lovely stills too.. We now have several vineyards of international acclaim with sparkling wine that rivals that of the French. Sussex Modern often writes in more detail about each vineyard and even lets you know who needs help with the picking! For those interested in just sampling the wines though, many of the local vineyards offer tours and tastings year round.

We now have several vineyards of international acclaim with sparkling wine that rivals that of the French

Exploring the Sussex Wine Region

The good news for our guests is that many of these wonderful vineyards are right on our doorstep and are open year-round for visitors interested in tours and tastings. A lot of them have restaurants too – fine wine, fine food and fine company sounds like the perfect way to spend a day!

Tickerage Wine – 6 minutes from the cabin!

Tickerage is our closest vineyard – you could even walk it. It’s a lovely, family-owned vineyard that offers immersive tours that include a tasting of three of their award winning wines.

Tickerage is open year-round but you can’t drop in. They do offer public tours though and you can get in touch about private tours. Get in touch with them online.

Kingscote Estate

Renowned for its scenic vineyards and historic setting, Kingscote have a cellar door bar, café & kitchen, wine shop and an impressive estate and vineyard which you can tour, adding on lunch or a cream tea if you so wish! Book online to secure your space.

Kingscote Estate is open 7 days a week between 10am and 5pm

Busi Jaconsohn

Busi Jacobsohn is a boutique winery in Sussex which focuses on producing limited quantities of high-quality wines. They offer few public tours but if you get in touch in advance, you may be able to visit their cellar door or have a private wine tasting.

Busi Jacobsohn Wine requests that you contact them before visiting. They may be able to open their cellar door and could possibly even book in a private tour.

Bluebell Vineyard – 20 mins from the cabin

Bluebell has gained recognition for its classic English sparkling wines. Their tours commonly include guided walks through the vineyards, insights into their winemaking techniques, and conclude with tastings of their diverse sparkling wines. Tours and tastings can be booked online or you can just pop along and take a wander through the vineyard and woodland trail and enjoy the spectacular views of the vineyard and waters from the terraced seating area.

Bluebell Vineyard is open 7 days a week between 10am and 5pm.

Ridgeview

One of the pioneering names in English sparkling wine, Ridgeview hosts lots of different tours and tastings, including pairings with cheese and themed tastings, all of which you can book online.

Ridgeview has a shop which is open all week but the restaurant is only Thursday – Sunday afternoons

Rathfinney

A significant player in the English wine scene, Rathfinney offers seasonal vineyard tours, which you can book online, providing insights into their vineyard management, winemaking processes, and sustainable viticulture practices. They also have a restaurant onsite.

Rathfinney is open all week but tours are on Tuesday – Saturday.

Hidden Spring – 16 minutes from the cabin!

A family-run establishment which focuses on producing premium still and sparkling wines. They give a tasting without prior booking but if you want a tour, you can book a group one online or contact them for a private one.

Hidden Spring is open Wed-Sun during winter 11-5.

Book your stay and explore the Sussex wine region

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Tags wine tasting

Sustainability

Rethinking waste: fabric

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 13 October 2023

Rethinking waste: fabric

Upcycling fabric to create soft furnishings

Rethinking waste part 3: fabric

In Rethinking Waste: part 1 – pencils and part 2 – books we looked at what happens to our waste and how we could rethink their purpose to make them useful again.

This article tackles an industry that has hugely detrimental effect on the environment: fashion.

The scary stats behind fast fashion

The fashion industry is responsible for an estimated 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions and has the fifth largest carbon footprint of any industry, according to the World Economic Forum.

So what are we doing about it? Very little it seems.

We purchase synthetic fabrics... which rely on fossil fuels.
We demand cheap clothes, so companies use factories in developing countries who regularly dump harmful chemicals in waterways. Around half a million tons of microfibre, which is the equivalent of three million barrels of oil, is being dumped into the ocean every year.
We keep purchasing new stuff, and that requires some 93 billion cubic metres of water annually (which is enough to meet the needs of five million people)
We discard quickly – according to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, every second, the equivalent of a rubbish truck load of clothes is burnt or buried in landfill.

A good pair of jeans can be recycled. Read more about how fashion designers are working together to redesign jeans to make them better for the environment.

Denim for life

At the Vacationist Eco Cabin we wanted to tackle fabric waste as part of our build. We chose to focus on denim because for decades jeans have been a staple of the wardrobe. Everybody has a pair.

The problem with jeans is that most people have not just one pair, but many pairs. Jeans from our younger days, which we can now only get on if we lie down and breathe in; jeans from a different fashion period which don’t quite work today; jeans with an annoying hole in the knee that won’t stay sewn up…. jeans, jeans, jeans.

We decided to rethink how we used some of our old jeans – creating soft furnishings for the cabin instead of storing them in our wardrobe for no good reason.

Rethinking denim – making cushions

I cut out the useable parts of our old jeans as well as some of the embellishments. Pockets and rivets make for great details. The scissors also came out on a pile of old tops and dresses that were misshaped, stained or damaged. None of them would have been wearable so there was no point donating them to charity.

Using both a sewing machine and hand sewing, I created cushions for the children’s room in the cabin that fitted with our book theme. I also made a lovely denim pocket cushion for the sofa.

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Tags fabric, repurposing

Sustainability

The eco score: how does the build stack up?

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 29 September 2023

A carbon-neutral space

How does The Vacationist Eco Cabin stack up?

Keeping the planet in mind

Can we say we are carbon neutral? It’s tricky to find a calculator or website that can confirm that for us, but what we do know is that to measure it, we need to think about two things:

Embodied carbon – connected with the build
Operational carbon – connected with the use.

Solar power

Solar panels need to be installed for just three years before the overall carbon footprint drops into the negatives. At this point, the panels will be preventing more emissions than it took to create them.

We’ve hooked up the solar to our infrared heating and water heater so that if you have excess energy it can be diverted to where you need it most. Nothing is wasted.

That means both the embodied and operational carbon are on target to be zero.

Solid foundations

Concrete is responsible for 4-8% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions – second only to water, it is the most widely used substance on Earth after water.

We chose to repurpose an old trailer for our base which means we don’t need foundations. We also gave new life to a piece of old machinery that serves no functional purpose anymore. We look at that as a win for both operational and embodied carbon.

Working with wood

Wood is renewable, has a lower thermal conductivity than brick and also stores more carbon than the manufacturing process uses, making it a carbon neutral material.

By sourcing wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), who typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled, we ensure growth in both forest cover and
CO2-hungry young trees.

We chose to use repurposed wood to clad our entire cabin. Saving carbon and saving trees.

Heating with gas

Heating was an environmental compromise for us. We cannot make it completely carbon-neutral because we have to use fuel to heat the cabin and the water supply for showers. This is a luxury cabin after all!

We chose to use propane. Whilst this is sourced from crude oil, so is not as environmentally friendly as solar, wind, geothermal or hydro sources, it does have less of an adverse effect on the natural world than gas or wood.

To balance our use of propane we have a tankless water heater that is one of the most environmentally friendly options available for off-grid set ups. It provides hot water only as it is needed.

If we look at the total footprint of our propane, its 0.19. That works out at 0.001 tonnes of CO2e per stay. We make sure that we add it up over the course of a year and reinvest into schemes to support carbon-saving initiatives.

Protecting water

As water scarcity and drought conditions persist globally, we are all being encouraged to think of reusing of greywater. We need to use our resources wisely.

Our compost toilet saves a massive 4-13 litres of water in a regular flush toilet. It does this by separating the solids and liquids, which removes the odours and means we don’t need a flush.

Composting the solids kills harmful pathogens but the nutrients remain. The result is an organic compost that feeds the soil as well as the plants. In the past this ‘night soil’ was highly coveted. These days we don’t like to think about what happens to our poo, but perhaps we should.

At the same time, we are saving carbon by removing the need for treatment. The carbon cost of potable water treatment is much higher than it need be, because we treat much more water to potable standards than we need to.

With no black water in our system (from the toilet) we can also use our greywater to irrigate the fields. We have built a filtration system that clears the debris and allows us to support the biodiversity around us.

Eco heating

Heating that uses hot air is highly inefficient. As infrared heats the material in the room, rather than the air, it uses less energy. It also has less heat loss. We have installed it throughout the cabin to keep your feet warm in winter.

Our heating aims extended to our log burner too. We love the feel of a cosy fire but burning wood has its issues. We chose a bioethanol rather to balance the feel with a cleaner fuel. Bioethanol is a renewable energy source produced by a sugar fermentation process. There’s no smoke and no carbon released. Our burner adds nothing to the environment and takes nothing from it either. What it does do is make for a very cosy living space!

When you couple all that with our double-glazing and sheep’s wool insulation, we have an efficient space with no carbon impact.

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Tags eco, Sustainability

Sustainability

Secret Cabin Bookcase Doors

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 28 September 2023

A door, a secret bookcase.

A secret cabin bookcase: books revived!

How we built a secret cabin bookcase door from unwanted books

Rethinking waste part 2: books

In Rethinking Waste: pencils we talked about what happens to day-to-day items when you have a surplus. All too often we assume can recycle something when in actual fact, we can’t.

This article tackles something a little trickier. Books. What happens when we no longer want the literature that has adorned our bookshelves for years?

For most people, the first option is the charity shop. But this isn’t always the solution you think it is.

And what about recycling? Books are paper…. or are they?

The story behind the secret cabin door

When we designed the cabin, we spoke to our kids about how we could make the children’s bunk room cool. They immediately knew – a secret bookcase door.

Through FB marketplace I came across a lady whose father-in-law was going into care. He had collected books his whole life and had a huge bookcase of ex-library books and old hardback history and travel books that she had no idea what to do with. We collected them and started working on our design.

And then we hit a snag..

Books are heavy and the door was huge. In order to turn the kid’s vision into reality, we would have to reduce the weight and size of the project and this could only be achieved by chopping up the books to make them two-thirds of the size.

That felt very wrong.

People have strong feelings about books. All those words that somebody wrote and all that time they spent creating their masterpiece. And the impact: a book has the power to inspire you, give you clarity, even change or challenge your assumptions about life. Chopping them up felt disrespectful.

Aware that we would have to abandon our plan for a secret bookcase, I spent a day trying to get rid of all the books I had accumulated. Some of them had beautiful covers and looked to have value, so I catalogued, photographed and researched the collection before sending the images to booksellers who appeared to deal in the relevant areas.

I was told categorically by all of them that they had absolutely no value and were not wanted. Send them to a charity shop.

I contacted charity shops, but with the current trend to de-clutter, and the rise of e-readers replacing physical books, they didn’t want all of my books. Some may have been accepted, but I had hundreds. If you think about it, it’s obvious. Storage is at a premium and charity shops only really want stock they can sell. And what sells is not always what is most popular. The Daily Telegraph reported that after the initial buzz about Fifty Shades of Grey, Cancer Research UK found that for every donated book they sold, “they (would) get two donations in its place… People are offloading them now in droves …its becoming a paper mountain”. They stopped accepting them.

There are of course online booksellers. Ziffit, for example. takes books. You can scan them in and may even make some money from Ziffit. Be aware they only want “good, readable condition” though. If they are annotated, damaged, missing a dust jacket, ex-rental or missing supplements, they get sent off for recycling. The same applies for webuybooks.

Recycle now says “Books cannot usually be recycled at kerbside along with other paper recycling because of the glue that’s used to bind them.”

So if charity shops don’t want them, Ziffit won’t take them and they can’t be recycled, what next?

Feel Good holiday

The Vacationist has been converted with the environment in mind. Lovingly hand-crafted by carpenters and creatives searching to reduce the carbon impact of holidays, the cabin is the perfect balance of comfort, escapism and eco- solutions.

Fabulous Location

Nestled in a private meadow, The Vacationist offers access to hiking, biking, spas, kids activities and lovely pubs! It is also next to Crockstead Fields – a festival and wedding site for those who are attending an event and don’t fancy roughing it in a tent!

things to do

Hike or bike the hills and cliffs; enjoy the ambience, food and drink of the local villages; immerse yourself in seaside fun; explore acres of Grade I listed landscaped garden and lakes at Sheffield Park or get your adrenaline fix at Branching Out Adventures.

A new chapter for old books

I started to wonder if perhaps we should rethink what a book’s purpose is. We are long gone from the days in which only one manuscript was written – when books really were sacred. If I took what I wrote above – about inspiration and challenging assumptions – I realised that we could keep the power of books alive by rethinking the way in which we used them.

Our bookcase idea was created by our kids because we have brought them up to read books. They were engaged and inspired by stories of secret bookcases and hidden dens. I had told them it wasn’t possible because we couldn’t cut up books, but now I realised that there was really no place for old books to go to die and perhaps they might actual fulfil their purpose by adorning our door in a more slimline form.

Creating our secret bookshelf door

I won’t lie – it felt very wrong bringing the saw down.

We took the books that were damaged or that we believed would not sell and methodically cut them into two-third versions of their former selves. We glued them into position (for safety).

The only book we bought during the process was “The Secret Door”… we wanted something that might grab a child’s attention and this was the perfect clue.

In place, the bookshelf looks amazing. But what is even better is the reaction we have had from young people. Their eyes light up with magic when they discover the secret.

When they go inside, they find books on adventuring and stories of the world, activity books and tales of how we can help the planet. They curl up and dive right into them. Our literary door has set the tone to a weekend of escapism, inspiration and creativity.

And isn’t that what books are all about?

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Tags secret bookshelf, Sustainability

Sustainability

Rethinking waste: pencils

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 27 September 2023

Rethinking waste: pencils

Creating an epoxy kitchen countertop from unwanted pencils

Rethinking waste

What happens to old things when you don’t want them any more? It’s all too easy to drop them off at a charity shop or put them in the recycling box and forget all about them. But what really happens to our waste?

We tried to think about this during the build, not just to save money and waste in general, but also to pose questions to our guests about what happens to the things they throw away. What do we do with the things that cannot be reused or repurposed. Where do the materials we use every day come from, where do they go when we are finished with them and is there a way we reuse them by rethinking their purpose?

Reduce, reuse, recycle… it’s all good stuff, but we want to add a new R for RETHINK.

Stay at the cabin to see our Epoxy Pencil Kitchen countertop in its full glory, and much more! See the cabin in full here.

It takes 82,000 trees to support the global demand for pencils

According to the Guardian, the pencil was once judged by Forbes magazine to be the fourth most important tool in human history… after the knife, the abacus and the compass. 14 billion are made per year. That’s a phenomenal amount of product.

But are they all in use? If you are anything like us, you have probably accrued hundreds over the years. Kid’s parties, pizza restaurants, corporate giveaways, pocket-money trips to Smiggle to buy something that smells like either tangerine or melon…. One pencil case has no doubt morphed into several, it’s become a box, it’s become a whole drawer.

So what happens to those pencils you no longer need or want?

Recycling pencils

Pencils are made of wood with a graphite, or coloured core (which is made by combining wax and/or oil, water, bonding agents, and pigments). They sometimes have a metal ferrule with a rubber on the end, and typically they are painted on the outside.

All of those things are recyclable, but like many products, the fact they are combined is problematic. They need to be stripped down to their component parts to effectively recycle them. Not only is that time-consuming, it only works if they are made from all-natural materials.

Pencils are often made cheaply with poor product. They might come wrapped in sparkly plastic, have glue mixed in with the clay or use synthetic rubber. That effectively makes them unrecyclable and curbside recycling won’t take them.

What about the alternatives? Well there isn’t really any. In the UK Terracycle offer pencil recycling, but they only take mechanical pencils. The same goes for Rymans.

If you want to use your old pencils, you need to RETHINK AND GET CREATIVE!

Creating an epoxy kitchen worktop

When we built our first project – Skoolie Stays – we created a kitchen counter out of old pennies and halfpennies set into epoxy. It looked incredible and so we decided that we’d tackle pencil waste in the same way.

We put a shout out on our local school Facebook Page and began a collection for people’s old pencils. They came in all shapes and sizes.

Each pencil was chopped down into a 1cm nub before being glued to a wooden base. It took several days and 2014 pencils to cover the entire piece. We then poured epoxy in several layers, sanding back each time to expose the pencils, before the final pour that created a glossy finish.

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Tags epoxy counter, pencils, Sustainability

Sustainability

Are holidays bad for the planet?

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 17 July 2023

Are holidays bad for us and our planet?

Mental health vs planet health

In 2013 a Holiday Health Report laid out the facts clearly: holidays are good for our mental and physical health. They help us live longer.

The report, which was run alongside Nuffield Health, showed that holidays can influence a whole series of key health indicators – blood pressure, ability to recover from stress, quality of sleep and our emotional health.

Fast forward to 2023, just ten years later, and we’re being told that tourism is damaging to the planet. By 2030, there is an expected 25% increase in CO2-emissions from tourism. That means we move from 1,597 million tons to 1,998 million tons.

So what do we do? Holidays are clearly really good for us. So how do we balance that with the damage they do to the planet?

Perhaps we need to think about HOW we holiday so that we can support our health and our planets.

What’s the damage?

Consider this… an average family of 4 emits 700-1000kg a year of carbon. To offset that they would need to plant about 40-50 trees and let them grow for a year to suck up the equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere.

If they jump on a flight to Southern France, the flights alone will cost them (and the planet) a further 1364kg in CO2 emissions. A further 60-70 trees.

But does that mean they shouldn’t go on holiday? No! It just means they need to be a bit more responsible about how they book a holiday.

How many trees to offset my emissions?

Airlines offer offsetting schemes, which you could consider. There is also the option of working out your own carbon emissions and paying into a project that offsets your entire carbon emissions.

Another alternative though is to not create carbon emissions in the first place.

The Vacationist Eco Cabin is a carbon-neutral stay – we run entirely off grid.

You can read more about our environmental credentials in our Sustainable Glamping article. And keep an eye on our posts as we explore some eco-friendly ways to get to the cabin.

What’s the damage?

If they jump on a flight to Southern France, the flights alone will cost them (and the planet) a further 1364kg in CO2 emissions. A further 60-70 trees.

But does that mean they shouldn’t go on holiday? No! It just means they need to be a bit more responsible about how they book a holiday.

How many trees to offset my emissions?

Airlines offer offsetting schemes, which you could consider. There is also the option of working out your own carbon emissions and paying into a project that offsets your entire carbon emissions.

Another alternative though is to not create carbon emissions in the first place.

The Vacationist Eco Cabin is a carbon-neutral stay – we run entirely off grid.

You can read more about our environmental credentials in our Sustainable Glamping article. And keep an eye on our posts as we explore some eco-friendly ways to get to the cabin.

The Vacationist: A carbon-free holiday

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Tags eco holidays, holidays

Sustainability

An eco-build for responsible holidays

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 17 April 2023
1 Comment on An eco-build for responsible holidays

Building the future of sustainable holidays

An efficient build for an efficient space

Keeping the planet in mind

The Vacationist gave us the perfect opportunity to build something that could illustrate how off-grid energy and minimal CO2 emissions could work hand in hand with style and comfort.

To do this, we had to think about two different things:

1) How we build an eco-friendly cabin so that there is minimal impact on the environment.

2) How we maximise the efficiency of the space so that our guests can enjoy a carbon-neutral holiday.

Building a carbon-neutral cabin

The UK’s built environment is responsible for 25% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Audit Committee are clear that we need to clean up our act and many companies have responded to this by creating solutions. We wanted to make the most of that.

At the same time, there is so much waste. Five million tonnes of construction and demolition waste finds its way to landfill every year. We wanted to incorporate that into our build.

We needed a two-pronged approach:

Work with partners who embrace sustainability and are already working to improve their design and supply chains
Repurpose as much as we could so as to reduce our own carbon impact.

1. Finding funds and partners

Incorporating the best eco-tech available is not the cheapest option – you need to buy new equipment designed for your space and not make do with second-hand. Repurposing has its place – as you will find out later in this article – but for now we needed to buy new. That meant thinking creatively about how we could fund the build.

We did our research and were lucky enough to catch the last funding round for LoCASE (Low Carbon Across the South East). The programme is supported by the European Regional Development Fund with the aim being to help businesses become more competitive and profitable while protecting the environment and encouraging low carbon solutions.

The Vacationist, being our second project, ticked all the boxes and Skoolie Stays was awarded 40% towards multiple green initiatives that would enable us to expand our business. This included bespoke double and triple glazing; sheep’s wool insulation; infrared and bioethanol heating; waterless toilets and solar power – big ticket items that would have been out of our price range if we had not had their support.

The aim for The Vacationist was to create a "zero-carbon" space - a home that produces zero or even negative CO2 emissions by maximising energy efficiency and renewable energy.

John Doe

Designer

A place to inspire people with sustainable design

With all the incredible eco-tech we had secured, we realised the potential of a space that could showcase the best in sustainable design. We worked hard to identify potential partners who shared our same vision of a world in which people take greater care and ownership of their impact, inviting them to collaborate with us.

Havwoods Flooring helped us with our incredibly stylish FSC-approved engineered wooden floor; Sofa Style, who are based locally to us in Newhaven, hand-built our sofas out of 600 recycled plastic bottles; Mini Moderns created a feature wall and ceiling in our kids bedroom and Showerwall took away the tiling pain with a acrylic waterproof panelling system in the bathroom.

2. Repurposing with purpose

We tried to think about this during the build, not just to save money and waste in general, but also to pose questions to our guests about what happens to the things they throw away: books, clothes, toys, coloured pencils, sofas, plastic bottles, wood offcuts, foam mattresses and sofas … can they be recycled? And if not, what can you do about that?

To find out more about how we managed to repurpose, check out our two articles on waste: Reducing Waste: books and Reducing waste: pencils.

For a greater overview on the build, check out our article on how the our cabin stacks up – where we focus on several different parts of the project and discuss carbon impact.

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Skoolie Stays Sustainability

From travelling the planet to protecting it

Post author By ruth.chapman5@gmail.com
Post date 15 March 2023

From travelling the planet to protecting it

Our story started with our family taking a gap year. So how did it end up in Sussex with an eco-cabin?

You can read more about how we prepared for a year travelling with our family, the what it was like to live in a school bus and the places we visited on our Skoolie Stays website

An American adventure

In 2019 we decided we wanted to shake up our suburban lives. Already keen campervanners, we took a gamble and bought ourselves an American school-bus. We found a builder in Salt Lake City to convert it for us and six months later we had packed up the house, taken the kids out of school and were on our way to start a year of adventures.

Over the course of 12 months we travelled 14,000 miles across 20 different states.

We hiked and biked 14 National Parks; stayed at vineyards and farms to enjoy local produce; kayaked with manatees and alligators in Florida; boated with whales and otters in Vancouver; sat on our roof deck to spot wolves and bears in Yellowstone; gazed in awe at rockets launching from NASA; climbed up and through Redwoods in California; scrambled on boulders in Arizona; swam in the Pacific and the Atlantic; collected beads at New Orleans Mardi Gras and hunted for sand dollars in Oregon.

It was an amazing year, but it was life in our off-grid Skoolie that elevated our journey into something really special. It became an symbol for living differently and, as our time in America drew to a close in July 2020, we knew we didn’t want that to end.

We decided to bring a Skoolie back home with us to Sussex so that we could share the sense of wellbeing that we felt came from going off-grid and spending quality time with family and friends.

Skoolie Stays: A school bus in Sussex

In 2021 we launched Skoolie Stays – our converted American school bus. We built it by hand, pouring all the love and knowledge we had accrued for American buses into it. The end result was quirky, clever and beautiful – we loved it and our guests did too.

We knew pretty quickly that we had got glamping right – just enough of our own story balanced with space for people to create their own.

The following two years saw us on an an incredible journey full of smiling guests, five star reviews, feature articles in books and the national press and even a rock’n’roll photoshoot!

Tackling the climate crisis

In 2023 we found ourselves in a position to launch another glamping project in a new location.

Where previously we had been motivated by sharing the mental health benefits that living off-grid had given us, this time we felt we wanted to address the challenges of tourism on the climate. The holiday industry contributes enormously to carbon emissions and we wanted to draw attention to this by building a cabin that was as close to carbon neutral as we could manage.

By showcasing the best of British eco technology and design, we wanted to inspire people to think about their own environmental impact.

Hopefully we would be able to motivate them to begin a journey towards a more sustainable way of living.

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Wine tasting and glamping breaks in East Sussex

Tours and tastings at internationally acclaimed vineyards not far from the cabin

Exploring the Sussex Wine Region, from the cabin.

The secret to Sussex’s success

Exploring the Sussex Wine Region

Tickerage Wine – 6 minutes from the cabin!

Kingscote Estate

Busi Jaconsohn

Bluebell Vineyard – 20 mins from the cabin

Ridgeview

Rathfinney

Hidden Spring – 16 minutes from the cabin!

Rethinking waste: fabric

Upcycling fabric to create soft furnishings

Rethinking waste part 3: fabric

The scary stats behind fast fashion

Denim for life

Rethinking denim – making cushions

A carbon-neutral space

How does The Vacationist Eco Cabin stack up?

Keeping the planet in mind

Solar power

Solid foundations

Working with wood

Heating with gas

Protecting water

Eco heating

A secret cabin bookcase: books revived!

How we built a secret cabin bookcase door from unwanted books

Rethinking waste part 2: books

The story behind the secret cabin door

Feel Good holiday

Fabulous Location

things to do

A new chapter for old books

Creating our secret bookshelf door

Rethinking waste: pencils

Creating an epoxy kitchen countertop from unwanted pencils

Rethinking waste

It takes 82,000 trees to support the global demand for pencils

Recycling pencils

Creating an epoxy kitchen worktop

Are holidays bad for us and our planet?

Mental health vs planet health

What’s the damage?

How many trees to offset my emissions?

What’s the damage?

How many trees to offset my emissions?

Building the future of sustainable holidays​

An efficient build for an efficient space

Keeping the planet in mind

Building a carbon-neutral cabin

1. Finding funds and partners

A place to inspire people with sustainable design

2. Repurposing with purpose

From travelling the planet to protecting it​

Our story started with our family taking a gap year. So how did it end up in Sussex with an eco-cabin?

An American adventure

Skoolie Stays: A school bus in Sussex

Tackling the climate crisis

Building the future of sustainable holidays

From travelling the planet to protecting it