This is my favorite home in the world. Built by Lloyd House and featured in Builders of the Pacific Coast, it’s on a small island in British Columbia. When I first saw it, it took my breath away. It was just perfect. The materials, the size, the shape, the way it fit into the environment as if it had grown there.
Funny thing: After 40+ years photographing builders and their buildings, I meet the builder of my dreams, and his name is Lloyd — House!
Even though we seldom see each other, we’re good friends. He’s built dozens of wonderful buildings in his career — most of them shown in the above book.
BTW, this is my favorite of all seven of our building books. It’s a story, an odyssey, from start to finish, hanging out with these wonderful people in British Columbia and documenting their unique creations. My intent was to take the reader along, riding shotgun, in my excursions to this land of wood and water.
With this new blog format, I’m opening up random folders of photos and posting ones I like. This was shot on the outskirts of Telluride in 2003 when I went there to do a presentation at a Bioneers conference. I’m trying to do a post every week day.
BTW, I’ve been using Google Photos, which automatically downloads all my digital photos in one backup folder. Right now there are over 90,000 of my photos in storage. It’s an amazing system. You pay a small amount for storage. I can then go in and search for “barns” and it will come up with all the barn photos. I used it in my driftwood book: typed in “beach,” and it came up with hundreds of of beach photos, many of which I would not have found otherwise.
Wikipedia: “…The service automatically analyzes photos, identifying various visual features and subjects. Users can search for anything in photos, with the service returning results from three major categories: People, Places, and Things. Google Photos recognizes faces, grouping similar ones together; geographic landmarks (such as the Eiffel Tower); and subject matter, including birthdays, buildings, animals, food, and more.…”
Dave Sellers is an architect in Vermont who has worked on a variety of fascinating projects during his career. One of his passions is concrete and he is currently finishing a poured concrete home. Here is a bridge he and friends recently built in Vermont.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Sellers
Shack along with mini-me shack alongside it
This is the upper of two treehouses, connected to the lower one by a swaying catwalk. I slept up here one night. Check out Foster on Instagram: www.instagram.com/fosterhunting
Note how the simple addition of the panel in front (of a gable-roofed structure) makes it look like an old ghost town building.
Rick has been working for months to coordinate the changeover from Blogger to WordPress and we’ve finally arrived. I was partially inspired by Cabinporn, with its large images. I also have more control over layout, but it’s going to be a learning curve. Here I go.
At left is a driftwood shack at the Mattole River beach. I’m in the midst of revising and expanding my book titled Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast.
I know everyone knows this but in case not, click on the photo.
Old guys at work. 153 years of age total here. Billy and I have worked together off and on for 47 years.
I’ve wanted to build a curved roof for a long time. I finally did it, with help from Billy Cummings. For the 6 rafters, we glued together 4 pieces of redwood bender board — 16′ long, 1″ by 4″, ⅜″ thick, using a jig laid out on the floor, with Titebond wood glue, and clamping every foot or so. It was a pretty tedious process, we could only do one a day.
We got the rafters in place, Billy did the blocking on the plates, and we used 1×8 rough redwood fence boards for the sheathing. Yesterday we put down the flooring — used shiplap pine from Heritage Salvage. It looks (and feels) great.
There’s nothing like a curved roof, especially with a tiny home; it gives you a feeling of spaciousness. This is the roof shape in gypsy wagons — vardos.
This is 10′ by 10′. If I did it over, I would make it rectangular, like 8 by 12 or 8 by 14. I’m going to put a bed inside on wheels, that can be rolled out on the deck to sleep out under the stars. I’m still figuring out where to put windows.
Shot this last month on my way to The Lost Coast, Nice carpentry details.
