Close your eyes and conjure up a vision of an ideal peaceful retreat. Then flick through a new book about hideaways and you will probably find yourfantasy already exists somewhere, writes Arminta Wallace
Maybe it's the long, dark nights. More likely it's the holiday ads wittering insistently at us from the telly. Whatever it is, there's something about this time of year which makes the idea of a hideaway - the architectural equivalent of getting into bed and pulling the duvet over your head - particularly attractive. A cosy cabin in the woods, a light-filled mountain hut or, if the sea is your oyster, a beach house.
Close your eyes and, just for a second, dream it up. Can you see it? A dramatically sloping roof, the stark shape of its inverted "V" framing a huge white-wood-and-glass wall. Translucent linen (or maybe canvas?) drapes unfurling like sails on either side of the window, which is full of: a) sky, b) waves, and c) sand. Wood floors and great rough beams complete the sense of a nautically natural space.
What you have just created in your head is the gallery bedroom of Hermione's House, the weekend retreat of Alison and Marcus Riches, one of five protected beach properties along the Camber Sands, near Rye in West Sussex, and one of the houses which feature in Huts, Cabins and Hideaways: Little Retreats with text by Jane Tidbury and photographs by Peter Aprahamian.
If the book's title has put you in mind of a sort of glorified garden shed, you may just need to redefine the "shed" part. The former woodshed owned by landscape designer Anthony Paul and his wife, Hannah Peschar, nestles at the bottom of their Surrey garden. There, however, the resemblance to most garden sheds most decidedly ends. It boasts a sleeping area, a sitting area, a kitchen, a shower and elegant leaded windows - and no matter how carefully you study the photographs, you won't find a single lawnmower tucked into a corner anywhere, let alone a pile of dog-eared cardboard boxes containing Christmas decorations or a festering heap of unplanted bulbs.
As for the 19th-century greenhouse near Hamburg that has been stunningly converted by the architect and designer Mathias Schründer, its spectacular conservatory-style roof gives a whole new slant to the old expression about people who live in glass houses not throwing stones.
To judge by the range of houses on display here, a "little retreat" can mean just about anything - apart, perhaps, from "small".
It might be a clapboard farmhouse in New York State's Catskill Mountains or a lighthouse in San Francisco Bay; a stone cottage on a Greek island or a converted laundry in the Scottish Highlands. It might be all cosy charm, like the Swiss Alpine chalet restored in 17th-century rustic style, or high-tech steel and glass, like the gloriously minimalist pond house which seems, literally, to float above the garden of Jenny Jones's home on the Isle of Wight.
Billed on its blurb as "at once a wish book and a practical guide", Huts, Cabins and Hideaways is a creature of the current design zeitgeist, all blond wood and light, with clean, lean lines surrounded by gardens full of cleverly dishevelled grasses and bamboos. Or nearly all: the shell-encrusted interior of a subterranean bath-house in Northamptonshire won't be to everyone's taste, nor will the patchwork quilt colours of furniture-maker Dave Fritchley's log cabin in Kent. But the sheer ingenuity of some of the dwellings, especially those which, in true retreat style, hark back to a pre-consumerist way of life - the simple glamour of a north American tepee, for instance, or the extraordinary basket-weave wildness of Mark Wilkinson's Wiltshire stone circle - is certainly admirable, if hardly as practical as the authors would like to think.
Some of these properties are available for rent - sample life in an ivory tower, courtesy of the Landmark Trust - or, if you're intent on building a hideaway of your very own, how about a treehouse from Pear Tree Ltd? A child's model is a snip at £6,000 sterling plus VAT, though if your heart is set on the workspace pictured in the book - which, cunningly interwoven with an ancient Sussex oak, can only be described as a branch office - you'll probably be looking at a bill of around £40,000 sterling. A tent might fit the bill better, in which case Tim Hutton, who runs weekend and summer courses on central Asian yurt-building in, of all places, Cornwall, is your man. On the other hand, you might just beat a path to the bottom of the garden and tidy out that shed.
Huts, Cabins and Hideaways: Little Retreats is published by MQ Publications at 14.99 sterling