For a life more wild

Let’s go back to 2010. A guy called Tom Dixon thought staying in a treehouse would be cool but he couldn’t really find any. So, he travelled around with some sketches in a leather-bound concept book, asking landowners from the Sawday’s collection and anyone else likely to have some wild ideas if they wanted to create places to stay.

He didn’t find any treehouses, but he found a load of other interesting stuff, like roundhouses and yurts. At one point, someone told him they were planning a treehouse. It sounded promising. Slight issue though, they had no actual trees. He left as politely as he could.

Tom’s book turned into a website. Please don’t look it up on Wayback Machine. It had a wooden plank effect background, that’s all we’re telling you. It was the 2010s, ok? The places caught people’s imagination because they were offering something different. We called it glamping, but soon realised that it was deeper than that. It was about creating a connection to nature.

Canopy & Stars has turned into the biggest name in glamping, wild accommodation, leafy sleeps or whatever you want to call it. Probably not leafy sleeps. We’ve been to thousands of places, still visiting each one like Tom did, chatting to the owners and seeing if it has that “life more wild” feeling. At this point, we were already pretty committed to all the nature stuff, but then we really went for it.

We became Employee Owned, we got B Corp status (with a pretty amazing score, if you can bear to hear us auto-trumpeting), founded a charitable trust and went even bigger on being about more than places to stay. We’re working hard on our own sustainability, helping our owners on theirs and working with people like Campaign for National Parks to improve the relationship between travel and the environment. 

If you jump forward another 15 years, you’ll find us still doing the same - using great places to stay to stealth some greenery into people’s minds and hearts, while using our platform to bang the drum for a life more wild, for everyone.

Let’s be honest, it doesn’t look very glamping-y, does it? Some of our places have stone walls! Stone! That’s something that would have been inconceivable to us when we started out, but we’ve come a long way since then. We have all kinds of places now, because when we went to see them, they felt right - a little wild, a lot of fun. Check some of them out:

Canopy & Stars was founded by Tom with the help of Sawday’s Publishing, a family-run company with deeply held principles about how travel should be done. When the family decided to move on, they split ownership between themselves, the employees and a charitable trust.

The charitable trust is guaranteed a share of profits that it can use to support good causes, while being EO and having the family still around as a guiding light means we all keep moving with the same shared purpose.

Our impact and sustainability is a constantly evolving process. When we first went B Corp, it was really handy as a way to measure the work we were doing and get fresh ideas on where we could improve. We set some big targets like being Carbon Neutral by 2030, but our insistence on including guest travel in our own emissions makes that a taller order than a giraffe on stilts. 

We’ve found that working closely with communities and organisations on specific solutions is way more effective than broad brush policies, so we put a lot of time into things like partnering with Campaign for National Parks, the Floaters campaign and working with Travel by B Corp.

It’s easy to be sceptical when something like B Corp comes along, but when we saw what the certification process involves, we realised they were the real deal. They wanted to challenge businesses in all industries to improve their working practices, environmental and social impact - and we love a challenge like that. We saw a lot of what we already did echoed in what they looked for, as well as some new ideas on where we could improve.

Our first score was 122.3 To give you some context, the average for a non-B Corp company is about 50, the B Corp minimum is 80 and the highest scoring company in the UK is around 160. A few years after our first certification in 2019, we improved our score to 129.3. That put us in the top 2.5% for travel B Corps globally, but we’re not done yet!

Ever since Tom set off with a notebook looking for a treehouse that didn’t seem to exist, we’ve been drawn to places that feel a little different. Not just somewhere nice to stay, but somewhere that takes you a little way out of the ordinary.

As our collection of unique stays in nature has grown, so has the pattern. People arrive with full heads and busy weeks behind them, and after a couple of days, nervous systems start to settle, phones get forgotten about, and being outside becomes the default. We didn’t plan that as part of some grand wellness strategy, but it keeps happening anyway. Put people somewhere a little wilder, and they tend to feel better for it. Fairly simple, really.

• Address: Merchants House, Wapping Rd, Bristol BS1 4RW
• Telephone: 0117 204 7830 
• Email: bookings@canopyandstars.co.uk.
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