This is my friend Travis in Olympia. He made this trailer for $7,000. He lives in it full time so he can move it when he wants. He is an excellent wood carver as well as a metalworker.
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.
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
Kate Todd’s handmade home near Point Arena, Mendocino County, California. Kate was featured in Home Work.
From our Tumblr
Deek’s Brockton, MA Hands‑On Tiny House Building Workshop 2016! Our workshops are fully hands-on, taught by a duo who have hosted and designed for HGTV and The DIY Network, have been featured in the New York Times, and are so fun and eclectic, that we have many people who have attended these workshops two, three, and even four times!
FEBRUARY 5-6-7, 2016, Brockton, MA (25 min. from Boston)
Well, its pretty thrilling that a museum that I hold in high esteem, and one that is gorgeous, has asked us to host a Hands‑On Tiny House Building Workshop! Naturally we said yes! This time around, we have more space than we know what to do with, all indoors (don’t worry, you won’t freeze to death!), and we’ll be tackling two, if not three, tiny cabin and shelter projects — all roping in the know-how you need to build a tiny house, shed, tree house, cabin, or funkified fort!
More info at relaxshacks.blogspot.com/…
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.
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Since discovering straw bale construction in 1992, Catherine Wanek has traveled widely to spread the straw bale gospel, and documenting traditional and modern examples of natural building. She co-edited The Art of Natural Building in 2002, wrote and photographed The New Strawbale Home in 2003, and wrote The Hybrid House in 2010. Her photos are featured in Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter.
Shown above, Thierry Dronet built this fairy-tale hybrid of straw bales and cordwood masonry, topped with a “living roof,” as his workshop and stable for two horses in eastern France. Bale walls act to retain the hillside, with a plastic sheet barrier and a “French drain” to wick away moisture. Time will tell whether this practice is advised.
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Bill Coperthwaite was a master yurt-builder/designer who was featured in Home Work. He died in 2013. Here is a selection of several of his wooden yurts.
The photo above and the two photos immediately below were Bill’s home in the Maine woods. It is 54 feet in diameter and was designed so it could be built over a period of several years and still provide shelter during the process. It is a tri-centric, or three-ring yurt with 2700 sq. ft. of floor space. You can first build the 16 ft. inner core as a room to move into. In the second stage, you can build the large sheltering roof over a gravel pad, allowing the major cost, floor construction, to be delayed. In the meantime you have a spacious area under roof that can be used for a workshop, greenhouse, garage, or for play.
Hi Lloyd and friends,
Just thought you might like to see some photos of SunRay’s latest creation — a funky little treehouse nestled in ponderosa pine trees, built during the recent 20th anniversary Natural Building Colloquium in Kingston, New Mexico. I have a bunch of images on my website here: www.theyearofmud.com/blog
It’s a beautiful structure, particularly the roof. Hope you enjoy!
–Ziggy
Brian “Ziggy” Liloia
Natural Building Workshops & moreP.S.: By the way, I’m greatly looking forward to the next book!
From www.lloydkahn.com/…
Ian Ingersoll’s home, built of recycled barn timbers in the ’60s with help from his friends Caleb (center) and John Welles (right). The home burned down in the ’70s. This picture is the cover photo from our book Shelter II.
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
From our Tumblr
Photo by Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn’s home, built in 1967 at Burns Creek, Big Sur, Calif., out of recycled lumber and hand-split redwood shakes.
I met Mike B. when we started working on the Tiny Homes and Tiny Homes on the Move books. Amazing builder, snowboarder, traveller. This guy does it all, one of the most inspiring people I know. Here is a newly released video by GoPro and him detailing the build and trip to Alaska.
Situated just behind New Street Station, the Birmingham Back to Backs are nestled in the very heart of Birmingham and are a residue of the history of the city’s population over the past 150 years.
The Back to Backs were originally tiny houses literally built back to back to each other in different quarters. Within these quarters communities would form. They were built in the 1800s in order to provide homes for the ever increasing population of the Birmingham of the Industrial Revolution. The Back to Backs were still inhabited by residents until the 1960s and 1970s when most of the courts were demolished to make way for more modern accommodation. 10 years ago the National Trust acquired the city’s very last surviving court of Back to Back buildings and has been preserving them ever since, much to our advantage.
From www.redbrick.me/…
Photo from: www.britainexpress.com/…
Photos of Back-to-Backs: www.google.com/…
Round roof barn in Willamette Valley, Oregon
There are buildings that have — for lack of a better word — a sweetness to them. Like a small abandoned cottage in an English field I once found, slowly disintegrating back into the soil from which all its materials came. Inside, I could feel the lives that had been lived there. Or the buildings of master carpenter Lloyd House. It happens most frequently in barns, where practicality and experience create form with function. No architects needed, thank you.
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Bill and Athena Steen, the straw bale/earthen plaster maestro/maestra team from Arizona are helping build this home, which will be featured in our new book, Small Homes.
Bill writes: “Interior adobe wall in a clay-plastered straw bale house we are helping our boys build in Sonoita, AZ.”
(Bill shoots pretty much all his photos with an iPhone — has been doing it for a few years. I’ve finally come around to doing this. Both of us still use the big cameras (him a Nikon, me an Olympus OM-D) for serious shoots, but the iPhone for everyday shots. The new iPhone 6s Plus has a super new camera.)
“I like to tell people what I see going on in the world…”
Last April, Shelter was visited by Yuichi Takeuchi, an artist, carpenter and treehouse builder from Japan.
Yuichi said he’d been heavily inspired by our book Shelter. He was making a movie called Simplife and wanted to interview Lloyd. Here’s a preview.
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