A house that welcomed people
Long before anyone paid to stay, The Oaks was simply a home that kept its doors open.
Over the years we have had the privilege of hosting people from Afghanistan, the Congo, Gaza, Albania and Rwanda — guests who arrived with extraordinary stories and left a little of themselves behind.
That habit of welcome is the thing everything else grew out of. It is also why we founded the Congenital Anaemia Network, a charity supporting families living with rare congenital anaemias.
The treehouse was an accident
Our garden had long been a place for fundraising parties and long summer evenings. But anyone who has hosted anything outdoors in Britain knows how that goes. After one too many soggy marquees, we started dreaming of something more permanent, and considerably more magical.
What we built was never meant to be a business. It was a shelter for gatherings that turned into a creative hideaway. Then visiting friends and patients started asking whether they could stay the night. Their delight was the whole idea: what if more people could experience this? We applied for planning permission, opened for bookings, and word travelled faster than we expected.
Then we kept going
Faun’s Hideaway came next, then Beaver’s Den — each one built around a story rather than a floor plan.
Beams with a history
Ancient timbers salvaged from the church where C.S. Lewis is buried, worked into the buildings they now hold up.
A little enchantment
Talking mirrors, hidden details and props made by hand — nods to the worlds of imagination we grew up in.
Bees and honey
Our Bee & Honey Atelier lets guests explore the hives and taste honey made a few steps from where they slept.
Bat walks at dusk
Twilight walks through the Shotover woodlands, and hands-on sessions for visiting school groups.
Standing for something
As Oxford grew, we kept running into the same problem our guests had: in glamping, it is hard to know what you are booking.
The market is thousands of independent sites, each describing itself in its own words, and very few names that actually tell you anything. We wanted Cedar Hollow to be one of the few — a brand that stands for the high end of glamping, so that our name on a woodland means something before you have seen a single photograph.
That is why Mallinson’s in Dorset joined the family, and why we are always looking for the next property that deserves the name.
The story of Mallinson’s
Our Dorset woodland was shaped by one craftsman over two decades.
Guy Mallinson trained as a cabinetmaker at the John Makepeace school at Parnham House in Dorset, took an MA in furniture design at the Royal College of Art, and built a Fulham workshop of sixteen cabinetmakers whose commissions ran from Walt Disney’s London headquarters to the Stirling Prize–winning LABAN building with Herzog & de Meuron.
Trading London for West Dorset, he turned to the older side of his craft: green woodworking, taught in a thirteen-acre woodland — chair making, bowl carving, spoon carving — and a turn as the wood mentor on BBC Two’s Mastercrafts, filmed among these same trees. When his students asked to stay the night, the yurts and shepherd’s huts he built for them grew into the pioneering glamping site Crafty Camping. The overnight stays were the guests’ idea — just as they were in Oxford.
Then came the treehouses. The Woodsman’s Treehouse, designed with Beam architects and built by Guy’s own team, won two RIBA awards and appeared on Grand Designs: House of the Year; Dazzle and Pinwheel followed in lockdown, each taking a RIBA award of its own.
Guy agreed the sale to Cedar Hollow in early 2026, with planning permission already in place for five more treehouses, and hands over the management of the woodland at the end of the year — describing its new custodians, kindly, as “a kindred spirit”. He is returning to his first love: designing and making things from wood.
Every stay does something
Bookings, jars of honey and boxes of bonbons all feed back into the Congenital Anaemia Network.
We also keep one weekend a month free for patients living with a congenital anaemia and their families, at no cost to them. If that applies to you or someone you know, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Come and stay
Six woodland retreats across Oxfordshire and Dorset, from a two-person hideaway to a treehouse built for a gathering.