UK studio Built Works has nestled a yoga retreat in an East Sussex woodland, wrapping it with charred timber and a raised veranda evoking a traditional Japanese engawa.

Named Yogi's Cabin, the 38-square-metre retreat sits alongside a pond in Great Park Farm.

It was designed for Architects Holiday, a hospitality company set up by the Built Works team that creates retreats designed around singular, restorative practices.

Following on from the studio's recently completed Drying Shed Sauna, also located in Great Park Farm, Yogi's Cabin was built around a yoga studio at the centre of its barn-like form.

"Most retreat spaces treat wellness as an amenity, something layered on top of a conventional brief," Built Works founders Will Gowland and Harry Kay told Dezeen.

"We wanted to make restorative practice the primary architectural programme: the thing that every spatial, material and orientational decision serves," they added.

"The east-west axis was set to track natural light across the day: activating eastern light for morning practice, the warmer, lower light of evening from the west for slower, more restorative sessions."

According to Gowland and Kay, the aesthetic of Yogi's Cabin is a blend of "Japanese domestic architecture and the agricultural vernaculars of rural East Sussex", with a deliberately simple form surrounded by a veranda informed by a traditional Japanese engawa and sheltered by deep eaves.

This engawa space wraps the entire exterior of Yogi's Cabin, expanding to host a sit-out area by the entrance, an outdoor shower alongside the bedroom and stepping down to a small pontoon next to the central yoga studio space.

"You can move, rest, eat or sit in all weathers without ever being fully exposed," said Gowland and Kay.

"It extends the usable area of a 38 square metre building significantly, and it's the reason the cabin feels larger than its footprint suggests."

Planks of locally sourced larch were charred by hand using the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique for the cladding.

Meanwhile, tucked beneath the roof of the home are areas of thatch made from local heather and birch tips to create "living eaves" for bugs and birds.

Internally, Yogi's Cabin and its fittings are lined entirely in Douglas fir, intended to create a sense of "total material continuity" that minimises distractions during yoga.

"The eye has nowhere to catch, providing what a practice space requires. The only counterpoint is stainless steel, used for the kitchen and bathroom, chosen for its utilitarian precision and its ability to let the timber lead," said the duo.

Gowland and Kay built almost every aspect of the cabin themselves, including the bathroom tiles, which were made with the help of Kay's children, and crockery made through his wife's ceramics studio, Common Objects.

Instead of internal doors, the spaces of the cabin are separated by curtains, block-printed by Kay using a pattern based on the cabin's floor plan.

Elsewhere, the studio previously collaborated with design studio Morrisstudio on a chocolate shop in Covent Garden, London, which was designed to evoke a golden age of confectionery.

Other cabins recently featured on Dezeen include The Root, a red, prefabricated structure in Greece by Kasawoo, and Cucu, an off-grid dwelling in Ireland by Studio Bucky that is wrapped in reds shingles.

The photography is by Connor Duffy.