Cabin Staircase
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About us

The staircase came first. The cabin was built around it.

Everything here started with a skip outside a demolition site in Ardgour, and a decision that in hindsight was not especially sensible.

Where the name comes from

In the spring of 2003, Ardgour Lodge was being pulled down. Robin drove past on the way to a job in Corran and stopped because there was an oak staircase leaning against the fence, waiting for the skip. Seventeen treads, a turned newel post, and a handrail worn pale in the middle by about a century of hands.

It cost forty pounds and two hours of arguing. It then sat in a barn for six years, because a staircase on its own is a useless object. It needs a floor to leave and a floor to arrive at, and we had neither.

In 2009 we bought four acres at the top end of Glen Etive and built Corrie around it. Not the other way around. The stair went in first, was boxed in plywood for the whole build, and everything else — the walls, the loft, the pitch of the roof — was measured off it.

People ask whether the name is a joke about a cabin having stairs. It is not. It is the order we did things in.

Robin Mackay, on the same question for the twentieth time
A timber-lined bedroom in Sitka, with doors opening onto the deck. The stove and larch lining in Larach, before the furniture went in.

How we build

Slowly, and mostly out of things that were already here.

Three cabins in twenty-three years is not a business plan. It is what happens when you will not start the next one until the last one is right.

Salvage before purchase
The stair in Sitka came out of a school in Oban. Larach’s came from a Glasgow tenement close. Both were free, both took a fortnight to strip, and both will outlast the buildings they now sit in.
Larch from the glen
The cladding is home-grown larch, milled nine miles away, left to silver on its own. We do not treat it. It goes the colour of the hill behind it within three winters.
Off the grid, on purpose
A micro-hydro on the burn does most of it, with solar on the byre roof for the long dark and a generator we have run four times in eleven years.

Who we are

Three of us, and a collie who thinks he works here.

  • Robin Mackay

    Founder, joiner

    Bought the staircase. Built all three cabins, two of them alone. Will talk about roof pitch for as long as you let him.

  • Cal Ferguson

    Buildings, water, weather

    Keeps the hydro turning and the track passable. If a tree comes down across the road at two in the morning, Cal is the one already out in it.

  • Rowan Beattie

    Guests and bookings

    Answers the email, writes the directions, and decides which cabin suits you better than you do. Usually right.

Come and see whether the stair was worth it.

Availability is handled by hand, not by a calendar widget that lies to you. Tell us roughly when and how many, and you will hear back the same day.

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