Lobelia is the name of our 864-square-foot two-bedroom straw bale home. Named after a native wildflower, Lobelia was built with many reclaimed materials, including all framing lumber, most doors and windows, and even the kitchen cabinet.
The straw bale exterior walls are protected by earthen plaster inside and out. Outside, the hip roof and wood shingle skirt, made from pallet wood scraps, along with a coat or two of raw linseed oil, help protect the exterior plaster from the elements.
–Alyssa Martin and Tony (AKA Papa Bear) Barrett
This is Sneak Preview #14 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Someone sent us these photos of this elegant little vardo, but we can’t determine who. Possibly the photos made it through but the accompanying email got lost.
Please contact us if you know anything about it.
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Master builder Vin Jon Gorman’s colorful, exquisitely crafted small home in progress. (See pp. 204–205, Builders of the Pacific Coast for his eucalyptus pod–shaped redwood sauna).
This is Sneak Preview #13 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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The house was designed to be very maintenance-free, using durable materials. It has a metal roof, 22-gauge corrugated Corten steel siding, concrete floors and 8″ wide oak plank floors upstairs.
4 × 12 Douglas fir beams were salvaged from the Seattle Federal Building for the stair treads. I used simple inexpensive materials for much of the build to save money, but the house has zero particle board. I wanted the materials in the house to be identifiable, real materials.
I believe that beauty is the highest order of sustainability. Whatever you put into this world, make it beautiful.
–Mike Buckley
This is Sneak Preview #12 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Kitchen in Guner Tautrim’s wooden home on California coast
Interior woods were all milled on site and include a floor of black walnut, kitchen cabinets of silky oak and black acacia, wainscoting of red gum eucalyptus, red ironbark eucalyptus, and yellow acacia; as well as kitchen counters made from large slabs of swamp eucalyptus…
This is Sneak Preview #11 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Small roundhouse guest cottage built by Tony Wrench in West Wales, UK
This is Sneak Preview #10 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Our house consists of a living room/kitchen, bedroom, and a bathroom. My husband Rob and I have lived here since July 2013…
Our cottage sits on just over six acres of land, partly forested, and rocky throughout. A 75′ × 55′ man-made pond is an “off-shoot” of the stream that borders the property…
Certainly we’ve made lifestyle adjustments, but we love “living small” and have found that almost everyone that visits says they would love to “live small” too!
Floor Area: 480 sq. ft. / 45 m2
This is Sneak Preview #9 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.
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Our French carpenter friends Yogan and Menthé spent several months last summer, hitchhiking up and down the Northwest Pacific Coast and trading their carpentry skill for room and board.
When they left, they visited us here and we downloaded about 1,000 of their photos. They’d had a great trip.
They wrote: “The U.S.A. is incredible, so much imagination. It was a perfect trip for me. Thank you Lloyd, I wanted to meet the amazing builders of the pacific coast. Your book Builders of the Pacific Coast was my motivation for my trip to the West Coast.”
I picked out a few photos and Yogan has written these captions. We’ll post them one at a time.
The Leviathan Studio on Lasqueti Island. Mark is a contemporary dancer who built this studio by himself. He used trees from his 12½-acre property. The south side was made with used windows; the floor is yellow cedar. The roof is green: he used EPDM roofing. It’s built it for dance workshops during the warm season. The architecture is inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci.
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From our Tumblr
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
During my bookstore tour in Oregon in June, I took a few days off to drive around in the Willamette Valley (south of Portland) to hunt for barns. It’s a beautiful area, kind of like a mini-Sacramento Valley — flat, rich farmland, abundant water, with steep mountain ranges on 3 sides. I spotted this barn with it’s gracefully curved roof and did my usual trespassing to shoot the exterior.
Read More …
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Mike Basich, our star builder in Tiny Homes, is building a small home in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Photo of it under construction.
This is Sneak Preview #8 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in October, 2016.
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