Building (356)

Brad Lancaster lives in a cottage (converted garage) on a piece of land in Tucson, Arizona. He harvests rainwater and has a grid-tied photovoltaic system. The house and grounds are carefully designed and built to maximize natural temperature regulation and to conserve water for growing. We’re doing four pages on this setup.

The public right-of-way adjoining property in 2015. All vegetation is irrigated solely by passively harvested rainfall and street runoff. All perennial plantings selected for their food, medicine, and wildlife habitat-producing characteristics.

–Brad Lancaster

This is Sneak Preview #15 from our forthcoming book, Small Homes, to be published in spring, 2017.

Via Facebook

Hello Evan,

The Gypsy traveler is something that has been on my mind for years. One day I just decided to build it. Everything is out off my mind in creation there are no plans. Never thought it would be finished, but its very close to being done. A gal from Connecticut has bought it and she plans to travel with a group of women to where only god knows. I am planning to build another one on a trailer. To me the build is the most fun and to watch people light up when they see it. Here are two photos to start, if you go to Mystical Views Facebook page you can see the whole build.

–John

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Nicely designed old home. Note the way the plane of the roof extends to form the porch roof. A stairway led to two upstairs bedrooms. There was a brick fireplace.

When I go inside places like this, I can feel the lives that were lived within.

Old homes designed like this show the cluelessness of almost all homes designed these days by architects.

• www.lloydkahn.com/…

Hi, Lloyd,

On first looking into your Shelter book in 1973, my fate was sealed. Since then, I have made my own ceramic tile, been a tile setter for 35 years, and am a serial remodeler and builder of tiny houses. Pictured here with my original Shelter book. I recently came upon your Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, and have been inspired anew. Rage on!

Sincerely,
–Fred Ross
San Anselmo, CA

• www.lloydkahn.com/…

The Building of the Cabin took 41 days. This included preparing the site for a foundation, building the timber framework, cordwooding the walls, and insulating and preparing the roof for earth, but did not include plumbing or electricity. While we built the cabin, we lived in a tent with our sons, then aged seven and five. Our days of building started at dawn and usually didn’t finish until 10 or 11 at night. We had no power or water on site; not only did this impact our building methods (everything mixed by hand, water brought to the site in drums), it also meant cold turkey from electricity for the kids.

• www.thehousethatworkedout.com/…

Built by Bruno Atkey in Tofino, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada, in the ’70s, and towed 26 miles to Hot Springs Cove, where Norma Bailey ran a “…great floating store selling emergency supplies, esoteric items, and Wild Coast history books,” according to Godfrey Stephens, who just sent this photo.

From www.lloydkahn.com/…

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.