In pockets of the British countryside, it's possible to stumble across clusters of beautifully designed, Scandi-style cabins. These aren't a product of the latest trend for off-grid retreats, but were created half a century ago by a pair of Welsh architects, Hird & Brooks. How did they become gripped by crafting the perfect holiday home? And why were they so inspired by Denmark?

By the 1970s, John Hird and Graham Brooks had already won a slew of major awards for their sleek, modernist post-war villas across the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales. But the highpoint of their careers was the prefabricated timber cabins they designed in the 1970s and 1980s for holiday parks in Wales and Forestry Commission sites in Scotland, and the English counties of Cornwall and Yorkshire.

For Brooks, the cabins were an opportunity to distil his design ethos into its clearest, purest, most compact form, says Peter Halliday, co-author with Bethan Dalton of Cabin Crew: Hird & Brooks and the Pursuit of the Perfect Holiday House. "He could do away with the tiresome necessities of domesticity that have to be accommodated in a conventional house, and focus on what really matters."

Professor Richard Weston, an architect and former Chair of Architecture at Cardiff University, echoes this. "[Brooks] always said the holiday cabins were the highlight of his career," he writes in the book. "They are a distillation of everything Graham stood for – the love of wood, the appreciation of proper architecture, the orientation of the Sun, and the feel for detailing and space – all stripped down for essential living."

Hird & Brooks were part of a worldwide boom in simple holiday homes. Many Danes and Swedes already spent their leisure time in cabins, or sommerhuse, along the coast or in forests. In 1960, Denmark had around 50,000 summerhouses. By 1975, the number had trebled, according to Cabin Crew.

Meanwhile, the summer cottage (a close relation of the dacha) was becoming a staple of Soviet society in the Baltic states and much of Central Europe. Everyone, it seems, was at it, even the big-name architects. Le Corbusier, the grand master of modernism, created his Cabanon de Vacances in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the south of France in the early 1950s. And in the US, architect Paul Rudolph was behind a series of simple wooden structures on the Florida Keys.

The mushrooming of cabins in the UK was in part a result of increased car ownership from the 1930s, as well as the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, explains Cabin Crew. The latter led to the construction of mass-scale seaside holiday camps equipped with prefab accommodation.

Hird & Brooks' cabins – some to be bought, others to be rented – drew on the duo's many study trips to Denmark, because Brooks was Denmark mad. "His heroes were Danish architects, his reference points were the Danish architectural press, and his new........

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