While the crew over at Beaver Brook's activities are limited to a single county in New York state, they've launched a sister site with more global influences. Cabin Porn is an ever-growing online collection of photographs of cabins around the world, from Maine to Iceland to France to parts unknown (or known but untold).

The variety of materials used range from timber to earth to stone, and the 500-plus images depict a surprising variety of building styles, from rustic to Modernist to at least a few that look like they're from the stone age.

The otherwise picture-heavy, text-light site is also peppered with super-quick book reviews from the editors' libraries, mostly on architecture and hand tools. One such review, plugging Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, provides some insight as to the editors' mentality:

Brand, famous for publishing The Whole Earth Catalog, suggests the best buildings are made from low-cost, standard designs that people are familiar with, and easy to modify. In this way people can gradually change their buildings to meet their needs.

It's for similar reasons that we love cabins and homegrown architecture. They're affordable, often built piecemeal, and continuously iterated as their builders (and inhabitants) learn more about themselves and the environment surrounding the cabin.