Budget Breakdown: It Took $8,400 and Four Hours to Build This Tiny Cabin in the Australian Bush

Thanks to Kabina’s clever system of interlocking joints, all you need is a rubber hammer to assemble it.

Text by

Penny Carroll

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Facundo Ochoa has been dreaming of creating a transportable, eco-friendly cabin for over a decade.

The Australia-based Argentinian designer first envisaged an emergency shelter that could be assembled and disassembled in rapid time. But over the years the idea has evolved into something more—an affordable, sustainable dwelling that can be packed up and moved like a piece of furniture.

The cabin’s drawing compass A-frame has an organic feel that blends with the environment.

"If you don’t need it anymore, you don’t have to let it rot—or knock it out and build something new," Facundo says. "You can sell this cabin like a piece of furniture or a car. I think the ultimate goal for sustainability is upcycling things."

The idea came to fruition during Sydney’s pandemic lockdowns. As work for his architectural practice, Nodo Arquitectura + Naturaleza, slowed down, Facundo began expanding his carpentry skills alongside his friend, cabinetmaker Nicolas Urien. Together they experimented with making furniture using Nicolas’s employer’s CNC machine and Japanese interlocking joinery techniques.

$5,439 Plywood	$333 Composite Decking	$2,136 Hardware
$2,220 Roof	$1,665 Windows	$565 Waste Disposal
$666 Machine Hire
Grand Total: $13,023 AUD ($8,407 USD)

Blending traditional craftsmanship with modern technology brought Facundo’s long-held cabin idea back to life. "Once I was confident enough with the CNC, I thought, maybe I can give a twist to this cabin that I had in my mind," Facundo says.

Working in a Sydney warehouse over the course of six months, Facundo and Nicolas developed a prototype for an easy-to-assemble timber cabin using cheap-and-cheerful plywood and interlocking joints. After first exploring skillion and gable roof designs, Facundo decided to keep it simple with a triangular A-frame structure that would need fewer structural joins.

"The triangle is much simpler because the load goes directly to the ground," he says. "You don’t have to brace it in one direction; it’s already braced by itself."

Although plywood was a cheap and practical choice, it gives the cabin a warm and inviting feel.

The shape also resembles a tent—a nod to Facundo’s love of camping and the outdoors. However, a sharp-angled design wasn’t the aesthetic he was going for. "I would never do something that works but doesn’t look good," Facundo says. "I added a curve to the triangle shape, because it blends better with nature."

Once the cabin’s A-frame is locked in place, the remaining pieces are slotted together and secured with timber pegs and a rubber hammer—if installed on a flat surface, the cabin can be assembled (and later disassembled) in about four hours, without power tools.

The first Kabina cabin cost $13,023 AUD (about $8,407 USD), and it’s currently set up as a retreat in the Northern Beaches area of Sydney.

The compact cabin’s footprint is just 4.8 meters by 3.6 meters (about 15.7 by 11.8 feet), and the designers based the dimensions on the size of standard sheets of plywood. The material was an affordable choice—it cost about $5,400 AUD ($3,500 USD) for the timber used in this build—but it was also a practical one, as hardwoods are more difficult to cut with a CNC machine.

Nevertheless, Facundo admits that cutting precise plywood parts for the interlocking system presented a steep learning curve. "The cabin is made from 40 plywood sheets—and in all 40, we had problems!" he says with a laugh.

The modular design of the cabin means it can be easily adapted to different sites, sizes and uses.

Once they had the prototype figured out, Facundo and Nicolas worked on streamlining the design to make it more budget friendly to produce. The CNC machine was the biggest expense as it’s costly to hire and run, although it enabled them to reduce waste by calculating each cut and tightly arranging patterns to minimize the number of plywood sheets they needed. They’ve since simplified the design so that cutting times are quicker to reduce energy costs: The A-frame, for example, now takes just 20 minutes to cut rather than the initial 40 minutes.

The cabin doors presented another creative challenge. Facundo played around with several standard door options before coming up with the idea for what he calls "Tesla operable doors" that open from the middle and are invisible when closed.

The unique "Tesla" doors can be hooked to the sides of the cabin; when closed, they have a seamless finish.

"They hinge on an angle so it’s really hard to get it right—but once we did, we were like ‘this is it,’" he says. "When you’re inside the cabin, you’re not able to see the doors. You feel like you’re part of the environment."

After assembling the cabin in Sydney’s leafy Northern Beaches, Facundo noticed another unexpected benefit: You can’t hear rain falling on the curved tin roof. "It’s amazing—you just see the drops falling in the bushland, and you can hear the animals. I felt like I was invisible."

Facundo is working on an update to the cabin that mirrors the doors at the back window to allow for cross-ventilation.

That immersive feel was crucial to Facundo’s dream of building a shelter that blends into its surrounds, bringing people closer to nature. Dubbed Kabina, the cabin is available to buy as a flat-pack kit for around $39,000 AUD ($25,000 USD).

Facundo imagines Kabina cabins serving as low-impact wilderness getaways, backyard studios, or Airbnb rentals—and he hopes that they can one day provide affordable housing as well. He’s now working on cabins of different sizes and shapes that include pods for bathrooms and other services.