Outside of Hani’s Man Cave.
SunRay’s a master of “natural materials.” He has a sure touch in making structural frameworks from twisted, gnarly trees. The posts and beams and oak cross pieces here all look like they’ve grown together. The joints are tight – competent carpentry.
“I want my buildings to sing and dance. I don’t want them to be static. Life is motion. Live is movement. The life force is always moving through us.” – P. 59, Builders of the Pacific Coast, where there are 26 pp. on SunRay’s work
I met Louie about15 years ago when a mutual friend brought me over to his shop. As we drove up to about the prettiest building I’d ever seen, Louie came out through the door with an old tattered copy of our 1973 book Shelter, told me to crouch down with him in the doorway. “Look,’ he said, pointing to the Mandan Lodge on p. 4 of Shelter, “I built this building from this painting in your book.” Wow! He turned out to be one of my 2 favorite builders in the world (the other is Lloyd House) and one of my very bestest of friends. He is the featured builder in HomeWork.
Louie’s a master craftsman. Everything he does is finely crafted. He’s a constant inspiration to me to do things better. It’s a treat for me to come up to his place. We walk along the riverbed, look for mushrooms, go out on his sailboat, drive along the coast (one day along the ocean listening to Leonard Cohen), have wild duck dinners, visit interesting people, and have whatever adventures we can conspire up.
This is where I stay when I visit; it’s a a circular room adjacent to the shop, desk on the left for my MacBook Air. I set up my Sirius radio and get in some writing while looking out at the vineyard, apple orchard and redwoods. Fire burning in little woodstove right now this cold sunny afternoon.
(Photoshop junkies: The Photomerge function didn’t work here, so I just pasted them side by side.)
Note: This is getting posted out of sequence. Such is life.
You get to this place on a 500-foot cable over a river (in winter when river is high). It was Thursday night and Louie was cooking a wild duck dinner for 4 of us. When I approached the house, it was lookin good. Louie insisted I get a photo with the big redwood tree and I got him to stand on the deck.
Yeah!
Louie built his house based on the sketch at bottom right of page 20 of Shelter, titled “Lashed-frame house in southern Japan,” shown at left.
“If every builder used 5% more American materials, it would create 220,000 jobs right now.” https://cdnapi.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/0_04vzdsr5/uiconf_id/5590821
From Brendan O’Connor
Skipping around a little in time here: Ed Stiles and his wife Marilyn live in a secluded hidden canyon in Marin county, just 25 minutes from San Francisco, but it feels quite remote. Ed has a wonderful shop with big used factory sash windows looking out into the trees. They had a party the day before I left on the trip. Below: shop, house, Ed, and an old treehouse.
Lew discovered this. It stalls periodically, maybe something wrong in the encoding. We found it best to turn off sound and let it load. Once it’s in the cache, you can play it straight through. (Seems somehow fitting that that the electronic world gets garbled around SunRay, who is a magician of the natural world.
Inspired By… SunRay Kelley from Shwood Eyewear on Vimeo.
“Growing up in the wild hills of the Pacific Northwest, it seems like SunRay was always building something. His favorite source of inspiration and materials is the woods around him, “God’s Hardware Store” as he calls it. When working on a project it is not uncommon to see him pick up a saw and head off into the woods looking for the right piece of wood to present itself. If he says anything, he’ll mumble ‘I’m going shopping.’
Filmed by Gary Tyler Mcleod & Austin Will; Edited by Gary Tyler Mcleod”
https://www.sunraykelley.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunray-Kelley/112608048761762
Outside of Hani’s Man Cave.
