Scotland’s sturdy mountain bothies have long provided welcome refuge from the elements for shepherds, mountaineers and fishermen.
Now, Edinburgh artist Bobby Niven and his schoolfriend, architect Iain MacLeod, have teamed up to market a modern prefabricated version of the huts, built in the Highlands, and designed to help owners and their guests get closer to nature.
The pair’s Artist Bothy is the first commercial product in Scotland to meet planning regulations recently introduced by the Scottish Government to make it easier for people to build simple huts for recreational use.
Funds from the sales of the £39,000 hand-crafted cabins, built from sustainable materials, will go towards supporting an arts project Mr Niven and Mr MacLeod helped to launch, which inspired their business venture.
In 2011 they worked together to design a remote residency space for artists, designers and craft makers, which was installed at Inshriach, near Kincraig, in the Cairngorms National Park and is still in use.
That marked the start of the Bothy Project, a non-profit organisation that operates a growing network of similar buildings, including one on the island of Eigg and another in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh.
Mr Niven said: “The success of Bothy Project showed us how much artists benefited from residencies and access to nature in our bothies and the continuous demand for holiday stays confirmed that everyone, not just artists, benefited from time in these special spaces.
“As a result Iain and I sat down to look at how we could improve on the original Inshriach Bothy design and create a prefabricated bothy, removing the headache of a complex build and instal, and taking the ethos of simplicity and functionality even further.”
Mr MacLeod added: “As a design challenge, the Artist Bothy was a dream brief, to create a flexible space that could feel connected to nature in a rural environment yet also look at home in a more urban context.
“The result is a pared- down vernacular form that, although it appears very simple, is full of considered decisions to make this a unique and very functional space.”
