Canopy & Stars Brand Guidelines: Sawday’s Bristol Collection of Treehouses, Yurts and Cabins

Two people, a co-working farmhouse and a handful of spaces.

Canopy & Stars is a collection of outdoor places to stay — treehouses, yurts, cabins and the like — run from Bristol as part of the Sawday’s group of travel brands. Its own site describes it as “a collection of unique, creative places to stay in the outdoors” and uses the line “a life more wild.” The company behind it trades as Sawday’s Canopy & Stars Ltd.

The brand began in 2010. In a May 2021 interview with Outlook Travel Magazine, co-founder Tom Dixon said the idea grew out of a search for a treehouse to stay in, at a time when the founders saw a growing number of inventive places to stay being built across the UK. He recalled two people working in a crowded farmhouse co-working space, and said the brand launched in April 2010 with ten spaces; the company’s own about page puts the starting number at seven places. Dixon also said that when it launched there were no large direct competitors, so owners and guests had to take a leap of faith.

The parent business is older. Sawday’s says its founder, Alastair Sawday, was a tour guide in France who turned his notes on unusual French places to stay into a simply designed book, the start of a series of guides; it describes itself as having spent over 30 years finding and visiting places to stay. When TravelMole reported a change in its ownership in March 2018, it said Sawday had started the business more than 25 years earlier, and described the company as Bristol-based and, until then, family-owned.

Canopy & Stars took that guidebook habit of personal visits into a single category of stay. The newer brand concentrated on outdoor stays: places that were, in Dixon’s words, “beautiful, inventive, and downright crazy.”

Inspected in person, one space at a time.

The collection grew steadily. By 2021 Dixon told Outlook Travel Magazine it had more than 850 places to stay, from yurts and treehouses to converted horseboxes, with almost 900 spaces across the UK, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain; Short Term Rentalz also gave the figure as nearly 900 in December 2023. Dixon said the team visits every space it includes and accepts fewer than 20 per cent of the places that apply, and that it advises new and existing owners on building their businesses. The company’s site says the same about in-person inspection.

The brand’s editorial voice extends beyond listings. Canopy & Stars produces a podcast, A Life More Wild, about “the people, places and wild ideas that make life a little more interesting,” in its own words. English Wikipedia’s list of British Podcast Awards nominees shows the podcast on the shortlist for the Creativity Award in 2022 and for the entertainment-podcast award in 2024.

Its stated values centre on nature and impact. The company says it is a certified B Corp and has set environmental targets; in 2021 Dixon described a pledge to plant a tree for every booking and a searchable set of “Sustainable Spaces” within the collection. Cabins with wood-fired hot tubs, showers taken among the trees and off-grid farm stays appear in the way the brand describes its places, alongside shepherd’s huts and converted Airstreams. A Christmas gift card and seasonal guides to cabins with hot tubs are among the features on its homepage in November 2026.

Cottages, cabins and campsites.

Holiday cottage agencies sell places rather than products, and their pages are built around the property photograph. A typical listing opens on an exterior shot of a cottage, a cabin or a tent in its landscape, followed by interiors, the view from the door and, increasingly, the hot tub or the log burner. The companies publish these images themselves, usually taken for the agency or supplied by the owner, and the look of a brand is set as much by that photography as by any logo.

Naming follows the way people plan a break. Agency menus are organised by region (the Lake District, Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, North Wales) and by collection: dog-friendly cottages, cottages with a hot tub, coastal cottages, large houses for groups, last-minute breaks. Sykes Holiday Cottages, for example, lists collections of this kind alongside its region pages, and glamping and campsite platforms apply the same logic to shepherd’s huts, yurts, treehouses and pitches.

Search is the core interface. Guests enter a place, dates and party size, then filter by features and browse results as a list or on a map. Some groups now add conversational search: in February 2026 Awaze said it had launched an app within ChatGPT that starts with Cottages.com and returns live availability from a plain-language request.

Behind the consumer brands sits a second audience: property owners. Most agencies run separate pages that invite owners to let their home through them, and corporate sites describe group structures. Several of the names in this guide belong to larger groups: Cottages.com to Awaze, and Sykes Holiday Cottages to Forge Holiday Group, the parent brand Sykes launched in 2023. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it, and what it publishes, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

Employee-owned since 2018.

The ownership of the group changed in March 2018. TravelMole reported that Sawday’s and Sawday’s Canopy & Stars had moved to a structure in which 52 per cent is owned by employees, 24 per cent by a newly established Sawday charitable trust and 24 per cent by the Sawday family. The restructure was made with the guidance of the Employee Ownership Association, and Alastair Sawday said he had taken the idea from David Erdal’s book on employee ownership, Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working. The same report said Mike Bevens, formerly group commercial director at Brittany Ferries, had joined as managing director at the end of 2017.

The Canopy & Stars site still sets out that split. It says employees take part through an Employee Council of seven members, whose chair sits on the board and which meets the managing director every month, and that the charitable trust uses its share of profits to support environmental causes.

The group has also bought into the business of building glamping sites. In December 2023 Short Term Rentalz reported that the Sawday’s group — Sawday’s, Canopy & Stars and Paws & Stay — had announced the acquisition of Crown & Canopy, a glamping consultancy and long-standing partner, to strengthen the consultancy services Canopy & Stars offers owners. Crown & Canopy remained a limited company under the group’s ownership, and its architects and planners were to move into the group’s Bristol headquarters; the report said the combined offer included design services from RIBA architects and advice on funding.

For a design guide, Canopy & Stars shows how a curated travel brand can carry a guidebook’s personal voice into booking, with each place presented as a story about its setting and its owners. Compare Hipcamp, the San Francisco campsite marketplace, and Pitchup, a UK campsite and glamping booking platform. For this guide we use night sky blue, moss and starlight cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Canopy & Stars’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.