A tech worker’s trip to a remote Danish island prompted her new business, digital detox escapes. It's an experiential Christmas gift to give or receive.
Want to unplug over the holidays?
An analogue escape, just an hour from Dublin, will return to the simple life and give your mind the space to reboot.
With two cabins in Co Westmeath and managing another in Co Wicklow, Rosanna Connolly was working in tech and spending up to 16 hours a day on a screen.
She was already feeling burnt-out when she and her boyfriend took a trip to Copenhagen and on to the island of Samsø, a small island off Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula.
At the time, she was living on a houseboat in London and used to making the most of small spaces.
Such a lifestyle also inducted her in ways to be self-sufficient and sustainable.
She had to learn how to manage the vessel’s resources.
You can travel to Samsø from either Jutland or Zealand.
The island is notable for the fact that it achieved 100 per cent energy independence in less than five years.
Their reason for journeying there was more personal. Her boyfriend wanted to get a tattoo from a certain artist who resided on the island at the time.
Their accommodation was organised last minute.
“I spent three nights camping there in the middle of a meadow, and never before had my mind felt so at ease,” she recalls.
As she caught her breath, she realised the beauty of dipping into a simpler life, one without the constant pinging of notifications and doomscrolling on a device.
“I returned from the trip a new person and wondered how I could recreate this feeling for others,” she explains.
The horizons of her world had opened up.
And the answer was really simple: spend more time in nature.
She was just 27 when she had her epiphany.
She quit her job, sold the boat and started fund-raising to build two cabins on a large farm in Co Westmeath.
These were to be digital detox escapes, where you put down your devices and look up and around.
The name Samsú is a play on the island of Samsø, switching out the Danish character, the accented o, a distinct vowel and the language's 29th letter of the alphabet, for an accented u with a fada, to make it Irish-sounding.
One of these was designed by an architect in New York, and both were built in Baltimore, Co Cork and finished onsite.
This Westmeath location was selected because it was just an hour’s drive from Dublin and had mature forested trees on its lands.
She leases the land from the farmer, and for a minimum of a two-night stay, you can choose from very different-looking cabins and unplug from the frenetic pace of life.
There is a clapboard brick red tower that resembles the lighthouse at the end of Dublin’s South Wall.
Called Cucu, it is lined in plywood, features lever taps, and has a small two-ring hob and counter to cook and prep food.
There isn’t an Eircode to give the Deliveroo driver, should you fancy a late-night cheesy pizza.
It offers an outdoor copper bath, heated by gas in an instant.
Should you feel the need to record the moment, you can use the Polaroid camera instead of reaching for your device.
Saoirse, the cabin with the black façade, includes a wood-burning stove and outdoor fire pit.
She also manages a third cabin in Co Wicklow. It too is less than 60 minutes from the capital.
It all sounds wonderful in theory, but how many of us could, in practice, surrender our tech for 48 hours and spend that time either in our own heads or in the company of another person, with no distractions to divert us from ourselves?
Imagine having no search facility to make us sound more interesting than we think we are?
For couples, it means a different type of intimacy. You have to look into each other’s eyes and use old-school techniques, such as your personality, to engage and charm.
The styling is spot-on. Solar panels with battery storage deliver electricity, and bottled gas heats the outdoor tub and showers.
There are compost toilets that Connolly insists are many cuts above the basic long-drop model many may be familiar with using at festivals such as Glastonbury.
There’s a king-size Emma mattress to sleep on, high-quality cotton bed linen and the sound of silence, save for the lowing of cows and birdsong.
There are books to read, games to play and even a cassette player to fool around with. There are lockboxes you can put your tech into.
The onus is on the person to switch off their phone. There is no detox or phone police,” she says.
“It’s about spending quality time with the other person,” she explains.
You can, of course, cheat and spend the entire time there watching movies on a screen – as long as you have a facility to charge the relevant device, but what would be the point of that?
You can also drive into the nearest town and eat there.
She now has a 75 per cent occupancy rate with demand outstripping supply at peak periods. The key demographic is between the ages of mid-twenties to mid-forties.
It may sound like a contradiction, but she uses Instagram and TikTok to promote the cabins, an irony that is not lost on her.
“You’ve got to fish where the fish are,” she says pragmatically.
To find out more about these immersive experiences, visit Samsú.
