Inside Josh Duhamel’s Bare‑Bones Minnesota ‘Doomsday Cabin’ Retreat
Fantastic, another celebrity extols the virtues of nature like we haven’t heard that sermon before. Josh Duhamel, the Transformers alum now pining for life sans plumbing, has been playing pioneer in his self‑dubbed “doomsday cabin” for 15 years—and yes, he really did start with outhouses and lake‑wash dishes. According to a recent Country Living chat, the 52‑year‑old actor stumbled onto a half‑parcel of lakeside land an hour and a half from Fargo, N.D., and thought, “Why not build a rustic getaway that’s roughly equivalent to medieval camping?” So that’s exactly what he did. After grabbing a second plot featuring a tiny hunting shack and a third with a fairytale red cabin complete with stone chimney, Duhamel essentially curated a Terry Redlin painting in real life.
He admits he and his family spent more than a decade homesteading without modern conveniences. No plumbing. Just an outhouse and lake‑side dish duty. It’s almost as if he actively chose discomfort for Instagram fodder. Yet Duhamel insists roughing it has helped ground him, and he’s not wrong. He told Parade on April 10 that going off‑grid “fulfills the soul” because the nearest store is 40 miles away, forcing everyone to rely on each other instead of Amazon Prime. I told you so—sometimes, you can’t fix lazy with a drone delivery.
Despite the hardship, Duhamel says it’s worth every mosquito bite. He praised how his kids get to be actual kids, chasing frogs and dragging home filthy boots instead of swiping screens. In a recent interview with PEOPLE, he gushed—well, as much as this grumpy guru can tolerate—about teaching son Axl, 11, the survival tricks he learned along the way. And now that newborn Shepherd is on board, apparently the cabin calendar is full of saw‑chopping lessons and water‑carrying drills. Who wouldn’t want to swap central heating for chopping wood at dawn, right?
Sure, L.A. has its perks, but Duhamel insists nothing compares to the “exhale” he feels when he escapes traffic and social media. He’s become inexplicably handy—because necessity is the mother of invention, not YouTube tutorials. And making memories out there, he says, trumps any red‑carpet appearance. As for naming it a doomsday bunker? Blame Hollywood flair or maybe midlife crisis, but the guy clearly likes living on the edge of convenience.
At the end of the day, Duhamel’s wilderness experiment is more than a celeb vanity project—it’s a forced detox. He’s still widening that disconnect from screens and reminding himself what’s important. Did anyone expect a different outcome? No? Thought so. And that, dear reader, is why we can’t have nice things—like indoor plumbing.
Sources: Celebrity Storm and People Magazine, Country Living, Parade
Attribution: Shawna Noel Schill (Creative Commons)
