Unyoked: How two corporate dropouts built Australia’s most popular off-grid cabin empire
Shackled by nine-to-five living and chained to the wheel of industry, Cameron and Chris Grant knew they had lost their way.
The twins had adventure and education in their blood courtesy of a merchant seaman father and teacher mother who’d met on the high seas and then rambled their little family all over Australia.
But in their 20s, the twins found themselves slaving in stressful gigs for corporate titans.
“I was a Year 10 maths dropout working in strategy at the Commonwealth Bank and Chris was a digital marketer with Woolworths. Both of us were miserable,” Cameron tells ROAM. “So, we decided to scratch our own itch and make a fresh start.”
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.They came up with the idea for Unyoked — a cabin stay business for people who want to disconnect from work and reconnect with nature.
“I’d read about Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other tech giants using nature like the rest of us used gyms,” remembers Cameron. “It’s a creative process called periodisation — essentially the art of switching off to switch back on.”
The deeper they dug into the dilemmas of modern life, the greater their resolve to start a business offering an alternative, if only for a weekend or mid-week break.
“All the science tells us that humans think best in their most idle moments. It’s why you have such great ideas in the shower, lying in bed or outside bushwalking.
“But after the Industrial Revolution, a nine-to-five culture took over. Humans began to work like machines, sitting in little boxes in big buildings, looking down and rarely out,” Cameron says. “Technology made it worse by indoctrinating us into thinking that being busy was a desirable state, and boredom, or doing nothing, was undesirable.”
The twins knew that was hooey. With Mother Nature as their muse and partner, they began to think of their hideaway cabins as “an escape hatch from everyday worries”. The clientele? “In Thailand I met a guy named Miguel who’d been a high-flying lawyer, but when I met him he was lying in a river in a jungle,” laughs Cameron.
With Miguel as their spirit animal, the twins found a heartland to start up Unyoked: the verdant Kangaroo Valley, two hours south of Sydney.
“We wanted places that made people feel like they were in the middle of nowhere. So we letter-dropped the area and then drove around scouting locally owned sweet spots.”
Airbnb had started in 2007 when two savvy roommates offered air mattresses and breakfast in their San Francisco apartment. Today, the brand is worth $120 billion. Cameron says: “We asked hosts to monetise their unused land but not develop it and instead practice sustainable tourism by sharing the beauty of their property.”
The cabin aesthetic was “Scandinavian minimalism meets Japanese forest bathing with an Australian ethos of bringing the great outdoors inside”. Two friends — one an architect, the other a builder — built the prototype cabin in 2016.
“It took seven months and a thousand trips to Bunnings! And of course we named it Miguel.”
Nine years on, Unyoked has 140 cabin sites — 96 across Australia, 38 in the UK, six in New Zealand. Having branched into the United Kingdom by partnering with the Forestry Department on locations, conquering continental Europe is next. And with Unyoked now able to build 20 cabins a month, Asia and the USA are also in their sights
Despite the quick expansion, the ethos remains the same — and Mother Nature is the COO. All Unyoked cabins are off-grid and solar powered with kitchens, beds and compost toilets. After booking, guests are emailed a digital field guide with map directions to the cabin, suggested activities, packing advice for the terrain and even local recipes.
“As soon as you get that we want you to start exiting your default stressed mode,” says Cameron.
Car parks are 200m from cabins, as if to say “leave your worries behind”.
Inside are old-school tools to encourage mindfulness: a hand grinder for the coffee, a deck of cards, a boom box with a cassette deck and prehistoric television (a firepit).
Phone reception is strictly optional at Unyoked cabins. Some have it, others don’t, with various levels of connectivity in-between. Cameron says the cabins “are not just somewhere to stay, they’re somewhere to be”. With a partner, a pet or the kids, it’s all about immersion in nature and embracing isolation far from the madding crowd.
Easier said than done for rat racers who’ve forgotten how to relax. No worries, says Cameron, who has commissioned a meditative manual How To Switch Off: A Guide To Greater Clarity, Presence And Peace Of Mind for each and every cabin. It’s all part of making Unyoked “the Nike of nature — not a brand, but a way of life”.
Which begs the question: with business booming, isn’t it getting tougher to unyoke? “Even though we run lean on 18 staff we still sometimes feel like yoked men,” laughs Cameron. “These days we know how — and where — to switch our brains off. We book a cabin, get away from it all for a bit, and come back fresh and fizzing with ideas.”
