We took out a $300,000 loan at 23 to build a wellness cabin. We had no idea what we were getting into.

• Two recent college grads built a wellness-focused cabin in Front Royal, Virginia.
• They were slowed down by tariffs, and pivoted their gameplan in the middle.
• They're hoping to capitalize on Gen Z's focus on health and wellness.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rajan Chidambaram and Renzo Sanio, two 23-year-olds who built a cabin and turned it into a wellness retreat in Front Royal, Virginia, a town about 70 miles outside Washington, DC. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Renzo Sanio: When I got interested in real estate development, I was told that it's the riskiest way to play the real estate game, but you can create the most impact in the physical world.

They were not wrong about it being the riskiest way to play the real estate game.

When you build something, everyone wants to have an influence over what you're building — from the county, to the local covenants for what siding you have, to the building code. Ultimately, everything lands on the owner to handle it all.

We had zero experience in handling these complications that came up when we started building our cabin. We're also not well capitalized — we'd been saving money to buy the property, but took out a $300,000 construction loan to build the cabin — so you can barely even call us a developer. We're just two college students who decided to take on a really big project while we were still in school and soon to graduate.

I started to do some research and found that by 2030, one out of three travelers is going to decide to book a place based on its wellness offerings.

Then Rajan made a video speaking about wellness, and it gained a lot of traction.

Rajan Chidambaram: The video went ballistic. I had an insane amount of health influencers follow me — I had Kyrie Irving follow me off of that video. It was insane.

To this day, I don't fully understand why that video resonated so much, but it really brought to our attention that we can marry wellness with the type of asset that we're building. And, obviously, the demand is there, so we were like, "This is just the angle that we want to go."

Building a wellness retreat means going all-in on amenities

Sanio: It was always our plan to add a hot tub, a sauna, and a cold plunge, but now we're doing things like red light therapy inside the cabin.

We're also offering Normatec compression sleeves, and completely fleshing out the inside with sustainably sourced woods, non-toxic paints, non-toxic and fragrance-free soaps, all these little details.

We ended up landing about $30,000 over our expected budget, and that's just because as we grew on social media, we got more and more excited about the kinds of things that we could offer our guests.

We really got to splurge on those items because of all the attention we saw on social media. We thought we could offer guests a really good experience now because of all the demand.

Chidambaram: We have a thesis that this is where society is shifting toward — especially with the rise of AI and all this other stuff. People are going to crave real experiences, so that's where our heads were at.

Sanio: There's this whole wave of AI and digital this, digital that, but we've really designed this space for it to be a way to disconnect from that. This space has no TV, and it has games and features inside that we've curated to have people really connect with themselves, but also connect with the people that they go there with.

We didn't account for all the problems we'd encounter as hosts

Chidambaram: The growing pains have been more on learning the operational side of stuff, like fixing stuff for guests right before they come. There were a lot of things we didn't expect.

How can you even prepare for your power going out because the county was cutting down trees?

It's very cold up in the mountains, and one time we lost power for a couple of hours, and it froze one of our pipes to the hot tub.

Our water comes out of a spigot, and it was properly insulated, but the outside of the spigot wasn't, so it froze.

Three hours before a guest came, I drove up there and bought a heat gun. The hot tub needed to be filled in the next three hours, and I didn't have a choice. I started heating up the spigot, and the water came out.

So now we're thinking, how can we have the people in place to solve these unexpected problems that will happen? Because it's just not a matter of if — it's when.

We were also really delayed for about three months because of windows. Tariffs kind of hurt us. We were at a standstill for about three months.

Sanio: Our windows were fully framed, but you can't do any interior work until you're what's called "dried in."

Because if you have holes in everything and gas in your windows, and then you install your electrical system, the rain's just going to get to it. So we couldn't do anything until those windows came in, and we got the windows from Poland, and the tariffs slowed down that import process, which is why we were held after three months.

Then there was an inspection to test the air tightness of our build — which there's a regulation for. There's just so many regulations and so many inspections. It's not just one inspection at the end.

After we started to look into the wellness themes, we really wanted to flood the space with natural light, so we signed a $6,000 change order to have two more skylights installed. There was no budget for it, it was just something that we knew we wanted to have.

The total build came out to about $350,000 for the first cabin — we plan to build more on the property — and the land was about $37,000. We spent about $16,000 on furniture, fixtures and equipment.

We've hosted our first guests and are already thinking about what's next

Chidambaram: We've had a handful of guests so far. All of December is booked out, plus more than half of January, and a good amount of February and March, too.

Sanio: January and February are the slowest months for short-term rentals, and we've been killing it. Rajan handles marketing, property management, and booking, and we've been 100% occupied for those months.

Chidambaram: Our nights are dynamically priced, so weekends are a lot more expensive than weekdays. We also use software that takes into account holidays.

A good goal for 2026 is to try to hit an average of $450 a night. But right now, nights are going to be somewhere in the ballpark of $330 to $490.

Sanio: It's challenging doing something so complicated for the first time. We're doing something that's typically only reserved for people with a lot of experience in construction or real estate development.

We're encouraged by our online community — most of the audience that has followed along on social media are young people and aspiring entrepreneurs.

Chidambaram: They've seen our whole project come from literally nothing — like ugly trees and dirt to what it is now. I think that's a special connection that people feel to watching us grow.