On 5 October 2021, Martijn Doolaard came home. Not to a flat in Amsterdam, where the Dutch graphic designer turned videographer and travel writer had lived before embarking on the epic road trips that made him internet famous, but to two Alpine stone cabins in the Italian Piedmont region.
“Always dreamed of having my own place in the mountains,” he posted on Instagram. He’d paid €21,000 (£18,200). The cabins had the space, the view and the solitude he was craving. However, they needed a lot of work if they were to be habitable all year round. Doolaard promised to document the renovations on YouTube.
Anyone who had previously followed him on social media would have known that Doolaard would stick to his promise. In 2015-2016, he cycled from Amsterdam to Hong Kong on a whim. In March 2017 he embarked on a two-year bike trip from Vancouver to Patagonia. He had published two pleasing coffee-table books about both journeys, and shot some epic footage. He had learned to launch the drone he used to film and take photographs without even getting off his bike.
These were minor successes, however, compared with the films of him doing up his cabins on a YouTube channel he set up for the purpose, which, despite their meditative pace, have netted him 584,000 subscribers. As one journalist put it, why are 500,000 people lining up to watch paint dry? Yet his weekly instalments are fascinating and strangely elegiac, unhurriedly recording the painstaking tasks he sets himself and anything else that happens to occur.
Each episode opens with gentle piano or distant cowbells over a gliding shot from the air, like a bird cruising at his altitude. Doolaard appears on camera well before he says anything, wearing a shirt, blue jeans, leather boots and an old-timer’s hat. When he does speak, it’s as if to an old friend. Mostly alone, he digs trenches, planes timbers, stacks stones, bakes bread, looks out at the spectacular view. “When I started,” he tells me, “I thought that this is going take a long time, and if I want to make weekly videos, they need to be very close to who I am.”
Doolaard’s filmic voice is the antithesis of most YouTubers, who edit their films so tightly they even cut the breathing space. “A lot of YouTube content is very fast,” he says. “It’s incredibly tiring to watch.” His slow pace, instead, allows people to “wander a bit, reflect on things, travel through their own memories. It’s like reading a book – you create a pleasant space for yourself.”
Doolaard focuses on process, not outcome. Watching him taking on the mother of all buried rocks with a handheld hydraulic drill is like witnessing Ahab reckon with the whale. “I try to focus on the moment all the time,” he says. “Planning traps you. Arriving at a goal is only exciting in the short term. At some point my home will be finished, but that won’t last. That’s why I enjoy the journey so much.”
Back in 2014, clean-shaven and hatless, Doolaard had a day job that saw him working on branding photoshoots with confetti and swirling paint. His only building experience was “some cosmetic work in my apartment in Amsterdam – painting ceilings, that kind of thing”. But the great beyond beckoned. In May of that year, he took a yellow van on the road to the Czech Republic for a two-week stay in a farmhouse, where he hoped to write music. It’s funny, once you know where that impulse led him, to see him wondering if he’d survive without the internet and human company.
He knows why more and more people watch his work and why so many ask to come to help out. “It’s to escape from everyday life and enjoy nature,” he says. “For some it’s a holiday, but most really want to get out of their comfort zones.” He has had visitors from all over the world and at all times of year. Last December, a young plumber from the US got in touch (see video no 49). “I warned him of the snowstorms ahead and that he had to sleep in a tent. But he didn’t budge.”
In the latest chapter, no 83, which is entitled Big Change, Doolaard seems happier than usual, jubilant even. He finishes the internal walls on the top floor of the first cabin, and, with the help of three men in shorts, removes the floor to reveal the building’s full height. What made this moment different, I wonder. “From time to time,” he tells me, “one job makes a world of change to the property. Letting the light in the basement was one of those.”
Doolaard doesn’t write scripts, and in each episode only uses footage he captured that week. If a shot feels familiar – an overhead view of the two cabins side by side; the panoramic spread of peaks from the picnic table – it is nonetheless different. Cloud and leaf and hue have shifted. Time has made itself felt. But when will the series end?
“This project could take as long as I want, really,” says Doolaard. “Right now it’s about renovation, but it afterwards it could be about gardening, or creating art or making furniture. It’s quite endless.”
