One Night in Vipp’s First U.S. Guesthouse—a Monolithic Upstate New York Cabin

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

As it’s my job to look at them, I can be a bit jaded about impressive spaces. Even still, I wasn’t immune to the allure of the Vipp Guesthouse. Since the Danish design brand introduced its first bookable accommodation more than a decade ago—a prefabricated steel-and-glass pod on Sweden’s Lake Immeln, dubbed Vipp Shelter—the company has been growing its portfolio of architectural getaways designed to showcase its furniture, lighting, kitchens, and home accessories. (Or as Vipp’s site puts it, "for visitors to stay within our design universe and experience our products together as intended.") I’ve stayed tuned to its various openings: its Copenhagen guesthouse in a former water pumping station, revived 1300s French town house, and off-grid brutalist "Tunnel" house in Tasmania are among the many that Dwell itself has covered, in addition to stories about the Vipp co-owners’ own homes. At the time of writing, Vipp has 16 guesthouses curated by the brand and furnished with its products, and it recently launched its own time-share program, too.

So when I heard that Vipp was opening its first U.S. getaway just a few hours drive from my home in Brooklyn and I was invited for a press visit, I was excited to find out what it would be like to stay there. Would an overnight at the Vipp Pavilion, designed by the award-winning architecture firm Johnston Marklee, really feel like living in Vipp’s design universe, or would it ultimately still seem like a brand activation? Also, how would the sculptural structure, which sits on the edge of a pond on a 16-acre meadow in the small hamlet of Pond Eddy in Sullivan County, fit in with the rest of the brand’s portfolio—and into upstate New York’s increasingly bougie boutique hotel scene?

I arranged a two-night stay in February—before the retreat officially opened in early March—and invited my friends, Sophie, Cooper, and Phoebe to join me on the jaunt, lest I go totally stir crazy in a cabin all by myself. The weekend prior to our trip, the Northeast got hit by a big snowfall, and it became clear we’d be indoors more than usual for a typical upstate cabin trip. No matter: all the more time to enjoy the Vipp kitchen.

Friday

10 a.m.: After two and a half hours in the car, we arrive and the property is still quite snowy. In normal weather, we could drive right up to the house, but instead we park on the opposite side of the pond since our car doesn’t have four-wheel drive and can’t make it up the snow-packed path. Something about arriving on foot makes our first glimpse of the cabin feel a little more magical, as if we’d been hiking all morning and then stumbled on this weird modernist oasis. On the drive up, we passed what appears to be an A-frame cabin and rental cottage not far from the property, and those stalwarts of the Upstate Weekend Vacation Experience set the oddity of this boxy structure in sharp relief. Other Catskills and Hudson Valley design stays that have opened in recent years, like Piaule, Eastwind, or Wildflower Farms, more directly reference cabin or farmhouse aesthetics. Vipp Pavilion, meanwhile, provides something of a counterpoint. The 1,200-square foot, single-level building’s gray exterior—which alternates between rough and ribbed stucco—slightly camouflages with the trees that have lost their leaves.

We pass through a curved stucco courtyard to a small vestibule clad in sapele. We kick off our shoes then proceed to the main room, which is fronted by an entire wall of glass that looks out onto the pond. It feels like standing in the operating room above a painting of a bucolic nature scene, like we’re totally removed from the environment but still constantly observing it.

The view is mesmerizing, even though most of the landscape is still bare and frozen from winter. The Pavilion’s two bedrooms run rather small, so it’s clear this is the space we’ll spend the most time in. I naturally get first dibs on bedrooms and run back and forth between the two, trying to decide which I’d prefer. I opt for the one with the round skylight, which looks similar to the small oculus in the kitchen. The guesthouse’s three skylights all have inset globe lights—something I’ve never seen before.