How “Cabin Porn” Took Over the Internet – Dwell Magazine

This story is part of Dwell’s yearlong 25th-anniversary celebration of the people, places, and ideas we’ve championed over the years. In 2009, Zach Klein wanted to escape the internet. The now 42-year-old built his career online: originally a partner at CollegeHumor, he began working on the launch of video-sharing site Vimeo in 2005. Klein never thought that the internet would be his career path; like many millennials, he had dreamed of working in a field that, by the time we became working adults, had all but died: print media. (He would wind up as the CEO of Dwell from 2020 to 2023.) To distract himself, Klein immersed himself in a passion project. The concept was simple—he posted photographs of cabins and tiny homes on Tumblr—but the name was catchy. Enter “Cabin Porn.” “I decided to post daydreams[…]sort of like the path I didn’t take,” Klein says as he reminisces about the project more than 15 years later. He filled the Tumblr with photographs he’d collected of homes he “fantasized” about living in rather than the “apartment that I had in Brooklyn.” Cabins in seemingly abandoned landscapes; tiny homes off the grid; a rough-hewn A-frame in a snowscape, all available on
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