Airbnb's Most Popular Rental

It started life as DIY kit assembled in a spare patch of land for a newly homeless friend

Now this tiny wooden cabin sheltering in the oaks and redwoods of Aptos, California, is the most popular rental on Airbnb.

Other properties on the home-sharing website are more glamorous, and others are more likely to be tagged by Airbnb’s “wish list” button.

But in terms of actual bookings, the mushroom cabin, which describes itself as a “geodesic dome loft”, has consistently come out on top since it began listing on the site about seven years ago.

Back then, owner Kitty Mrache had been advertising the cabin on Craigslist “but I was frustrated with how undependable people were,” she said. “They would say they were coming and then wouldn’t show up.”

At the time, Airbnb was in startup mode – just 11 months old and, according to Kitty, and “going through a lot of challenges”. In those early days, listings were either in New York or San Francisco. The mushroom cabin was among the first that placed Airbnb outside cities.

“Almost immediately, we began getting reservations,” said Mrache, who runs the property with her husband, Michael. But it wasn’t until Airbnb invited them to a party for selected hosts, where company employees excitedly claimed they were “rock stars” and dragged them off to meet the founders, that they realized “the impact we were making or how comparatively successful we were”.

“We were blown away,” she said of the Airbnb event for its VIP hosts. “We had no idea what the culture was like in San Francisco. I used to live there in 1968 – so it was kind of a shock to me. Almost everybody at the party was hip, young and really into loud music. Very fancy clothes. And here we come in our laid-back, Santa Cruz dress. I was a little out of place.”