I’ve been building yurts for 15 years, and for the last 8 I’ve lived in my own, off-grid, summer and winter. On a 6-hectare estate with woodland, fruit trees, horses and a standalone solar system. I don’t speak about yurts as a hobby: this is my home, in every season.

Let me tell you something I don’t often say out loud. A few years ago I came up with a new insulation: I laminated cork, rock wool and a heat-reflective lining together. In my head it was perfect, and others agreed. I actually manufactured it, and over a full season I built eight to ten yurts with it. And it worked, right up until it had to be taken apart. Because it turned out to be fragile: the cork tears, the rock wool crumbles. One move, and it was damaged.

I retired that technique, and to this day I count it as a failure, because it chipped away at the very thing I hold most sacred in a yurt: that you can take it apart and rebuild it easily, without harm. A yurt is a yurt precisely because you can carry it with you.

That is why I build the way I build today. I don’t know what you need to avoid because I read about it. I know because I did it myself, and learned it the hard way.

Behind me stand more than 20 years: the Sárkánylovas (Dragon Rider) association, the years of experimental archaeology, my own village of 7 yurts.

Everything changed in 2008. I was an IT entrepreneur with my own chain of shops, until I bought my first horses. I was given a wild, rubbish-strewn patch of land: I founded an association, cleared it with a grant, and turned the horses loose on it. That first evening, after the long work, I milked a goat and drank its milk. There, in that quiet, I understood how simple life could be. Within months I wound down the company and set out toward self-sufficiency. That sunset, that goat, those horses turned me onto the path that led, in the end, to yurts.

I’m starting this school because I watch people make the same expensive mistakes I already made. My mission is that you won’t have to. I give you more than a yurt: I give you myself.

There are no student testimonials yet. But there are 20 years standing behind it.