For years I thought the good stuff was elsewhere.
Not in a vague way either – I was absolutely desperate to escape the UK at any opportunity. I was booking flights to places I’d seen online and coming home to a country I’d stopped really looking at. The assumption was baked in: magic happens abroad, ordinary happens here.
And then I started stumbling across places that undid that logic. A house on stilts hidden in almost-tropical Cornish forest. A cabin in a wildflower meadow that could easily be Provence. A design house on a Hebridean island where the sand is white and the water is, genuinely, turquoise. I’d look them up and think: this is in the UK? How did I not know?
That’s the question Kip came out of – and the work we’ve been doing ever since.
We’ve spent years finding the places worth a week of your summer. Places with easily as much appeal as anywhere you could fly to – closer than you’d think, and still somehow under the radar.
Here are 5 UK stays that transport you to distant shores – without the airport queues.
White sands in the Outer Hebrides.
The beach below the house – Uig Sands – has been listed by Condé Nast Traveller as one of the best in the world: white sand, turquoise water, the lot. The only catch is the temperature (a 5mm wetsuit is recommended). Getting here takes a bit of commitment – a ferry from Ullapool, then a 4-hour drive – but it’s really all part of the adventure.
What you get for the effort is an architect-designed eco-house with cloud-soft beds, an alfresco bath you’ll use year-round, and a glass panel above the master bed for stargazing – which closes at the press of a button. Golden eagles cruise past the living room windows. Whales pass the headland. It is unlike anywhere else in the British Isles – or the world, for that matter.
Sleeps 2, 8 or 10. From £300 / night →
A Native-American inspired cabin in the wilds of Devon.
The name means hawk in Lakota, and the design follows: hand-painted scenes of Seneca canoes, woven textiles, carved reliefs in the furniture, a stair rail made from a tree branch. It’s a tiny house on stilts, shaped like a birdbox, dropped into a 130-acre rewilding project where you’ll likely meet red deer, goshawks and longhorn cattle on your morning walk – and almost certainly no other guests. There’s a Swedish wood-fired bath under the stars and a print above the bed that reads I need this wilderness for my heart to beat – which, after a day here, starts to feel less like a slogan and more like a diagnosis.
Bringing African safari magic to the Lincolnshire countryside.
Archie and Emma left corporate London with a family link to Kenya and a clear idea: bring some of the magic of an African safari back to the English countryside. Teal Lodge is the result – a proper safari tent on a timber frame, canvas walls that roll up onto views of a private lake, a freestanding bath you can soak in with the side of the tent open. The wood-burning stove doubles as a tiny AGA, the kids can fish in the lake or get whisked off in the back of the owners’ Landrover for a wildlife spot, and a chef can deliver dinner to your deck. No elephants. But the sky is enormous and the projector under the stars makes a fair substitute.
Sleeps 4-6. From £188 / night →
Scandi design on the Cornish coast.
Lime-plastered walls, soft woods, oversized windows, sun-drenched and uncluttered – the mood here lands somewhere between Scandi calm and Japandi quiet. Built by Jayce and Hannah after years travelling through Australia, New Zealand and Bali, it’s been featured in Enki and Country Homes & Interiors and feels every bit a design house. But it’s also someone’s home, and you can feel it: rolled yoga mats on the mezzanine, organic veg plot, a river full of dragonflies at the bottom of the garden, and a sauna for warming up after a surf.
