Last week we got an email from Maria Michaelson, who lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest on a piece of land on which there are numerous innovative buildings, sculptures, boats, a house bus, and a variety of imaginative constructions. It’s called the Alchemy Art Center.
These buildings are mostly built by my husband, Eben Shay, although we live in a community of 8, so we have all been involved in building them. Eben is a boat builder, so he is always making everything curved. We live in the Pacific Northwest, on San Juan Island. And when we bought our property 6 years ago (with some of the buildings there but needing new roofs and reconstruction) we were very inspired by your Shelter books. We have started a nonprofit art center on the property to host artists in residence and art classes.
Also on Instagram: instagram.com/alchemyartcenter
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
Maria and Lloyd,
Thank you for sharing this wonderful and magical place.
Ken
Thanks Ken! It’s an honor to be on this blog! If you make it to San Juan, we can give you a tour of our 15+ unique buildings!
Wonderful! The inside reminds me of the mammoth bone houses!
Working With the shapes of the wood.
The outside is massively fine, too
Thank you