If you’ve got an appetite for backcountry exploration but hate setting up tents, perhaps a more comfortable wilderness hut would be a better fit. Designs for home-like retreats in remote locations range from minimalist sci-fi sleeping pods to luxurious vacation properties with modest exteriors that retain the feel of a homesteader’s cabin, and they’re often self-sustainable, portable and low-impact.

Back Country House by David Maurice

Throughout the wilderness of New Zealand, adventurous backpackers can find basic, rustic huts that will put a roof over their heads for a night or two. ‘Back Country House’ by LTD Architectural keeps the spirit of those simple structures while making it a whole lot more comfortable. Designed for the architect’s own family, the home features a spacious terrace that functions as the living room, with an outdoor fireplace and two sunken tubs in the deck keeping it cozy in winter. The pop-up tub covers double as tables for a sunken seating area.

Drew House by Simon Laws

A series of pavilions joined by outdoor walkways offers living space for a family near Queensland, Australia. Though it looks like a reclaimed sewer pipe, the rounded pavilion was just built to that shape using metal sheeting, capped on one end with hardwood louvers. All components were constructed offsite and transported to the plot to minimize disturbance. The passive solar home is self-sufficient, with rainwater tanks and recycling systems, solar power panels and solar hot water.

Tiny House in the San Juan Islands by Prentiss Architects

Overlooking the sea from its perch on Washington’s San Juan Island, Eagle Point Cabin by Prentiss Architects looks modest from the outside, with its rustic wooden facade and grassy roof. But inside, it’s just as comfortable as any high-end home, offering a wood stove, a wall of windows for whale watching, a spacious bedroom and a bathtub with a view.

Eco POD Hotel in Switzerland

Designed by Robust Outdoor Brands, Switzerland’s first eco POD hotel features dreamy little rounded rooms set into a snowy landscape. After dark, when they’re illuminated from within, they look almost too much like a fairytale to be true. Each low-impact room is made with FSC-certified wood and double-glazed windows and accommodates two people.

Tye River Cabin by Olson Kundig

Located in a dense forest near the Tye River in Skykomish, Washington, the Tye River Cabin by Olson Kundig architects is envisioend as a meditative retreat with pivoting glass windows that swing open to blur the lines between outside and in. The architects set the cabin on a concrete base and wrapped the exterior in rusted steel siding.

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Wilderness Huts For Backcountry Glamour 15 Not So Rustic Retreats

Spend an entire night climbing bell towers, composing your own sermons from a pulpit, examining historic artifacts up close or virtually anything else you want to get up to in one of England’s most picturesque rural churches. ‘Champing,’ or church camping, is somewhere in between mosquito-bitten nights in the wilderness and luxurious ‘glamping,’ with modest beds placed right in the nave of a centuries-old place of worship so paintings of Jesus can watch your every move.

England’s Churches Conservation Trust, an organization that takes care of 347 churches that are no longer used for regular worship, has opened three of its buildings to the public for overnight stays. You can have St. Mary the Virgin in Kent, All Saints Church in Northamptonshire or St. Cyriac & St. Julitta in Cambridgeshire all to yourself. Once the medieval-looking iron key is in your hand, you’re free to act like you own the place.

The experience is sort of like sleeping in a museum exhibit, getting all the time you want to look at every last detail of stained glass windows, architectural details, organs and sacred objects. St. Mary the Virgin, in England’s smallest and least-populated town, is quaint and provincial, while St. Cyriac’s features ornate Gothic windows. All Saint’s, with its soaring ceilings, can fit groups of up to twelve.

You’ll have to wash up with a jug and bowl, and the Conservation Trust offers to “very creatively turn a vestry into a champing toilet,” but for rates starting at roughly a hundred U.S. dollars per night, you’ll at least get breakfast delivered. Funds go to the continued preservation of these historic structures throughout Britain.

Quintessentially British, this boutique suite sleeps six, features a wood-burning stove and much more, but perhaps most amazing of all: the vehicle remains road-worthy, despite its conversion to a sweet retreat.

The Big Green Bus was originally part of the west midlands metro transit system and purchased by its new owner (and renovator) Adam Collier-Woods for approximately $7,500 at auction on eBay.

The still-working bus, driven back into the countryside by its buyer (and moved around on demand), required more than $15,000 to be turned into a unique three-bedroom accommodation, including a functioning kitchen and bathroom facilities.

Currently set on a “glamping site in the heart of the Sussex countryside,” the bus has its “own decking area, a fire pit and all this next to a beautiful pond.” The rural property can accommodate extra campers for parties larger than six who wish to enjoy a stay. In addition to pantry essentials (tea, coffee, milk, herbs and olive oil), logs for the fire pit or stove are available on request.

More from its maker and operator about its present location: “A gorgeous 15 minute walk away through country lanes to Chiddingly is the Six Bells pub, a classic traditional country pub, luring all sorts of music, poetry and arts lovers to its various festivals. Brighton is close by too with all its various charms, is 25 minutes drive down the road, or leave your car at Glynde and take the train. Lewes has more trains per hour, Make sure you get to the Lewes Farmers Market on the first Saturday morning of every month.”