Arts and creativity for fulfillment

From House to Hermitage: Poetic and Sociological Travels into Inner Sanctuaries

In a world where the soul tirelessly seeks its inner refuges, this text moves among the metaphors of shelter: the house that gathers dreams, the cabin that enters into dialogue with the forest, the hermitage that unfolds its silence. Inspired by the imagination of Gaston Bachelard and shaped by a contemporary sociological lens, it sketches a new breath: that of spaces lived as intimate landscapes, where dream, memory, and care converge. Musarthis invites you to this sensitive journey, where the art of dwelling becomes a way of existing — presence, rebirth, and a delicate attunement to the world.

DESIGN & WELLNESS

Musarthis Team

9/24/20253 min read

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House, Cabin, Hermitage: The Inner Shelter according to Bachelard, between Poetics and Sociology

For Gaston Bachelard, the house is an inner cosmos, a space of deep memory where every corner becomes a hearth of reverie, intimacy, and protection. The cabin, calling us back to the essential, and the hermitage, figure of radical withdrawal, complete this triad of shelter. Three forms, three intensities of dwelling, three responses to the need for refuge.

Beyond poetry, these figures also reveal a sociological dimension. The house is not only the place of the individual; it embodies a center of relations, a stage for transmissions, identities, and belongings. Within its hearth unfolds a social microcosm, a site of rituals and exchanges, where the we takes shape and endures. Christian Norberg-Schulz reminds us that all dwelling is rooted in the “genius loci,” in that subtle correspondence between space and being. Michel de Certeau, for his part, emphasizes that ordinary practices transform space into lived territory, a silent narrative inscribed in the fabric of daily life.

The cabin, while evoking simplicity and solitary reverie, also becomes a sign of resistance or an alternative. In the imagination of artists, ecological collectives, or new generations seeking sobriety, it embodies a rupture with saturated urbanity: a call toward simpler, more sustainable, more authentic ties. Like the nest in which the bird finds fragile security or the tent raised for a passing stay, it manifests the possibility of a lighter life — yet one intensely inhabited.

The hermitage, for its part, carries the extreme of withdrawal. In a society of hyperconnection, it responds to the quest for a chosen solitude, a space in which to rebuild oneself. Yet far from isolating, this gesture connects to an invisible collective: seekers of meaning, inner travelers who share common values without inhabiting the same place. Here again, the image of an inner chamber, like an intimate sanctuary, resonates as an extension of this fertile withdrawal.

Thus, house, cabin, and hermitage are shelters at the crossroads of the intimate and the collective. They reveal the tensions of our time: between continuous presence and the desire for retreat, between dispersed ties and the search for reconnection. The shelter, even as it protects, delimits; even as it gathers, it draws the boundary of the private.

Musarthis invites us to contemplate these shelters as sensitive laboratories, places where new forms of hospitality are invented, where psychic and social resilience is experienced. The house, the cabin, the hermitage — but also the nest, the tent, the inner chamber — then become spaces to dream and to share, matrices of presence where the shapes of a poetic coexistence are redrawn. In these intimate landscapes, the art of dwelling reveals itself as a profound breath, a way of existing in gentle attunement with the world.

Main References
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Paris: PUF, 1957.

Bernard, Antoine. Habitability and the Poetics of the Cabin in Woodland Environments, Université Laval, 2016.

Gainche, Lilouanne. Cabins: Heterotopia &, thesis, 2022.

Schnider, Jody. The Cabin, Between Primitive Image and Reflection, 2019.

Delbrassine, N. The Life of the House, 2018.

Illustration: Verly Amé