Play the podcast:
Intro & synopsis from the podcast page (www.thetinyhouse.net/lloyd-kahn), which also contains more images and videos:
Today my guest is Lloyd Kahn; and if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve probably seen one of his books. Lloyd published the seminal book, Shelter in 1973, documenting alternative housing ideas not limited to, but including, tiny houses, well before the current modern movement.
Lloyd has a lifelong fascination with shelter, and this conversation, we trace the steps of how an insurance broker in San Francisco built his own home and slowly transitioned to publishing internationally about Geodesic Domes, Tiny Houses, Mobile Houses, Driftwood Shelters and more. DIY building. While many thousands of the homes that Lloyd has documented over the years are small or tiny, he’s got a healthy amount of skepticism about the tiny home movement.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Lloyd’s books, his original influences of the counter culture of the 1960s, and how the concept of shelter has changed over the years.
In This Episode
- How did Lloyd’s fascination with shelter begin?
- Why Lloyd’s 1973 book Shelter is the most important of his work
- Why Lloyd decided to pull his Dome Books off the shelves even though they were selling
- Why Lloyd says that Builders of the Pacific Coast is Lloyd’s favorite book
- Lloyd tells the story of meeting and building with Derek ‘Deek’ Diedricksen
- Why Dome homes have fallen out of favor (and Lloyd is more than okay with that!)
- How Lloyd got into publishing in the first place
- What is causing the current fascination with tiny houses?
- Lloyd’s advice for first-time DIY home builders
- Lloyd’s two favorite houses of all times
- Lloyd’s take on aging well (He’s 83!)
- Lloyd’s new book coming soon: The Half-Acre Homestead (It sounds amazing!)
Links and Resources
Really cool Lloyd. Always good to listen to your wisdom. Thank`s for making the time.
It was an honor to have Lloyd on the Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast! The podcast player above may not work any more, due to a new web host. To listen to the episode, you can visit https://www.thetinyhouse.net/lloyd-kahn/