Cedar Hollow Dorset
The woodland
Thirteen acres on the corner where Dorset, Devon and Somerset meet — a working craft wood before it was ever a place to stay, and still managed like one.
Three treehouses stand in this wood, and all three were built by the same pair of hands that ran the workshop at the top of it. That is not a marketing story. It is the reason the buildings are the way they are.
A cabinetmaker moves to the country
Guy Mallinson trained as a cabinetmaker at Parnham House, John Makepeace’s school in Dorset, and took an MA in furniture design at the Royal College of Art. He then spent years in London running Mallinson Ltd, a workshop of sixteen craftspeople, fitting out among other things Walt Disney’s West London headquarters.
Along the way he developed wood-bending techniques and manufactured Bendywood®, and made the timber installation for LABAN — Herzog & de Meuron’s dance centre in Deptford, which took the Stirling Prize in 2003. Mallinson Ltd took the FX International award for best public space installation for the same job.
Then he moved to West Dorset, bought thirteen acres of wood, and started teaching people to make things out of green timber with hand tools.
Crafty Camping
Students on the courses needed somewhere to sleep, so Guy built yurts, tipis and shepherd’s huts among the trees. That became Crafty Camping, and it is the direct ancestor of everything here: accommodation built by a woodworker, out of the wood it stands in, for people who had come to be in it.
The workshop under the parachute shelter at the top of the site is still there. You walk past it on the way down.
Three treehouses
The Woodsman’s was the long-held ambition, and it opened in 2016. Designed with the architects Brownlie Ernst and Marks, it took two RIBA awards and appeared on Grand Designs: House of the Year and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces, and in 2026 on The World’s Most Secret Hotels. It is still, by a distance, the most photographed treehouse in Britain.
Dazzle and Pinwheel came next, both built during lockdown, when there was nothing else to do and no one to do it with. Each took a RIBA South West award of its own — three award-winning buildings in one small wood, which is an unusual thing for anywhere, let alone thirteen acres in Holditch.
What happens next
Guy secured planning permission for five further treehouses before deciding it was time to hand the wood on. From 23 November 2026 the woodland and the three treehouses pass to Cedar Hollow, and this becomes Cedar Hollow Dorset — the second of our two woodlands, alongside Cedar Hollow Oxford.
We are not planning to change what makes this place work. Two guests per building, no children, no dogs, no wifi and no noise. The same paths, the same in/out board, the same honesty shop. What we will do is finish what Guy started: the remaining treehouses, built to the standard the first three set.
Stays booked before the handover date are honoured exactly as booked. Nothing about your reservation changes.
Managing the wood
Thirteen acres is small enough to know tree by tree, and it is managed that way. Standing deadwood is left where it is safe to leave it. The bluebell ground under Pinwheel is kept off-path. Logs for the stoves come from the wood’s own thinnings, and the ash from the stoves goes back into it.
Beyond the fence line it is working dairy pasture, and we get along well with it — which is why there are no dogs here, and why you will sometimes hear a tractor.
Come and see it
Three treehouses, two guests each, thirteen acres of West Dorset.