Nine sauna cabins in a hollow in Page County, Virginia. We do not own the land yet. This page asks you for fifty dollars anyway, so it owes you an unusually straight account of what that buys and what can go wrong. That account is below the button, and also above it.
Not promises. These exist the moment the card clears, and they are what the fifty dollars actually buys.
Published on the public ledger that afternoon, if you want it there. Every dollar in and out of this project is on that page.
Where the drawings, the county emails and the arguments happen.
Drawings, cost models, county filings, the survey, the soil work. Including the ones that go badly.
Named decisions go to members. When the calendar opens, members choose dates in the order they joined.
If no cabin is ever built, you still received all of that. That is deliberate. It is the difference between buying something and betting on something.
Your $50 becomes $100 against your first stay. Double, in kind. It does not expire, it has no cash value, and you can give it to someone else. It is not a return on an investment, because this is not one: Hytte Hollow sells no equity, no revenue share and no financial return of any kind, and will never ask you to invest.
A refund right that ends whenever we choose is worth almost nothing. So it is bounded by dates that do not move with our convenience:
The cap is what makes those real. 500 members is $25,000, which we can return out of an existing line of credit without selling anything at all. A refund promise the seller cannot fund is not a protection, it is a sentence. That is why the cap is not a marketing device and why we will not raise it.
Nobody selling you one of these will mention Oculis Lodge. We are going to, because you can find it in ten minutes anyway and we would rather you found it here.
Oculis Lodge crowdfunded $1.2 million on Indiegogo in late 2022 from more than 1,750 pre-bookings, the most successful lodging campaign in that platform's history. By early 2025, one dome had been completed. In February 2025 the founder asked backers for another $1.2 million. In March he emailed them to end the project. Backers spent two years asking for refunds; the Washington State Attorney General's office received complaints. The site was auctioned in June 2025 and bought by someone else for $450,000. It is on Airbnb now, at about $400 a night, earning for people who had nothing to do with the campaign.
It failed for reasons that are boringly specific, and every one of them is a thing you can check us against:
And the harder case, which we think people taking deposits should have to say out loud: in Antrim County, Michigan, a couple took more than thirty deposits between 2015 and 2017 against confirmation emails promising a refund if the site was not ready, and never paid them back. They pleaded no contest to three counts of larceny and were sentenced to two years' probation. Taking money for a thing you do not build is not merely a business failure. We would rather build this with that fact in plain view than pretend it does not apply to us.
Not a pitch. The ledger has every dollar we have spent to date, in the order it moved, starting at $11.88. The journal has the county correspondence, including the reply telling us a camping unit here is capped at 400 square feet, which forced us to redraw the entire cabin. We published that the week we got it. We will keep publishing them at the same speed whether they help us or not.
The full terms are at hyttehollow.com/terms, section 2. Hytte Hollow is a project of HTELLE LLC, Florida. Membership money is held in a separate account, is never counted as revenue, and appears on the ledger as committed by guests. Questions to hello@hyttehollow.com; we answer them.