Sydney R. Jones was an English artist around the turn of the century who did exquisite drawings of English country life. Back in the 70s, I collected a number of books (via printed catalogs and mail order) with drawings and photos of English cottages. This drawing is from the book Old English Country Cottages, published in 1906. Note the four beehives (skeps).
Our hexagonal tower with its new shake roof. Shakes hand-split by Bruno Atkey on Vancouver Island, applied by Billy Cummings (I was recovering from a wrist operation). There’s a 6-sided copper cap, a piece of 3/4″ copper pipe, which is flared out at the end and holds a quartz crystal from Nepal (that I got at the Green Festival in San Francisco). If you’re standing in the right spot at the right time of day, it sparkles in the sunshine. (Got the idea from my friend Louie Frazier.)
Lew discovered this great sleeping platform on https://thistinyhouse.com. I traced it back to https://is.gd/eFdz4, but there’s no indication of where it is, or who shot the photo. I might just build something like this. The roof keeps fog and dew off the bed, yet the steep angle allows you to see a lot of the sky. Can anyone track this down?
Yesterday was brutal. 100º. Us Northern Calif. coastal people are weather wimps. If it’s 90 we start melting. If it’s 35, we get frostbite. So this 3-day heat wave, where it went from high 40’s (at night) to 60º higher, was a shock. Lew and I worked in the office yesterday, whew! At the end of the day I went down to the beach. The water coming out of the lagoon was relatively warm, maybe 60s, and I stood waist-deep in the cool water. The stress of the day vapoorized. Dove in, body cooled. A young local surfer/skater bro came walking by in the shallows, and said, “Paradise!”
A few days ago, some doves flew off when Lesley walked out to feed the chickens, and she reached up and grabbed a feather in mid-air that was floating down. Very delicate little 2″ feather. Seemed like a good omen.
Here’s a rough photo of some rough layouts of the tiny houses book. I am having fun!
I am selling the 20 sided house that I built in Topham, VT ten years ago. The house is almost round and has great southern exposure with lots of windows on the south side. It has a massive central chimney made of old concrete road culvert tiles that holds heat well and distributes it throughout the space. The main timbers for walls, floors and roof are softwood poles harvested locally. The top floor is wide pine boards, with some 24″ boards. The sole source of heat is a woodstove and the water for the clawfoot tub is heated by a gas fired on-demand hot water heater. Water is gravity fed and comes from a spring.
Joe Golden
Traditional stilt house in the lagoon of Messolongi, Western Greece. Until 1700, Messolonghi was under the control of Venice. Its inhabitants were mostly fishermen who lived in cabins called “pelades, “made of a kind of waterproof straw and reed and standing on stilts above the water.
Made of willow branches and tule leaves, these were the dwellings of the Acjachemen Indians in the San Juan Capistrano area in California (south Orange County). In front are “gossip rocks,’ where women pounded acorns.
In the mail this week:
Mr Lloyd Khan
A girlfriend gave me your Shelter book a few years ago and it was instrumental in helping me think that it was OK to build what I wanted to build, and still conform to all the rules I had to face.
My story (short version): After a summer of river rafting I was pretty much homeless and headed for the land I had bought for $4000 a few years earlier. I built a shack (with a lot of help from my parents) in the fall, early winter; out of found materials – except the 8 by 8 hand-hewn Basswood posts i traded for a video about a local Arborist company – and 2 by 6 plywood floor which I bought. All else, foam, tin, windows, were from the garbage or very cheap.
Yesterday I got an email from Cheryl Long, editor of The Mother Earth News. She’d seen my photo of the round barn in Vermont (posting of Aug. 6) and wrote:
“Speaking of round barns, here’s the one my sister owns and is trying to raise money for a new roof. We think it is the largest round barn in the world! https://www.starkeroundbarn.com/ It has this unusual framing system that we don’t know what to call it–big beams just held together by the weight of the building–3 stories high–almost no braces or pegs, no mortise/tenons. Do you know what it’s called? Seems pretty rare.”
In this morning’s mail:
Hello Lloyd, hope everything is fine in your life.
I send you a picture of a construction call: “Garage à gargouilles” (in English Gargoyle’s garage) that I did some 10 years ago (most of my building have a name. Some curves look like to the house of Lloyd House that is in your marvellous book: Builder of Pacific Coast, which I discover only last year.…Claude Drolet from Québec