Published by Martha Danly under Green Building, Inside Design, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Products

Let’s have a show of hands: How many people do you know who fit the following profile?

A 73-year-old Californian, small and wiry, who is:

• an active surfer, skateboarder, and runner;
• who, without formal architectural training, installed a living sod roof on the first house he built back in the 1960s,
  four decades before living roofs became darling icons of the green movement;
• who built another house using timbers salvaged from a dismantled bridge;
• who constructed a number of geodesic homes, then abandoned the whole concept as being impractical
  (hello-o-o-o-, Bucky!);
• who served as the Shelter editor for the renowned Whole Earth Catalog, and for the past 40 years has been the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, producer of books ranging in topics from architecture to fitness to symmetry.

This is not a fictional Indiana Jones of the building trade, but the actual living polymath named Lloyd Kahn.

Last Sunday afternoon Lloyd and his wife Lesley invited me for a tour of their home, garden, and production studio in Bolinas, a small town on the Northern California coast. My jungle guide was Sim Van der Ryn, a distinguished pioneer in ecological design, founder of the Ecological Design Cooperative, and longtime friend of Lloyd’s.

Over a cup of tea at the Kahns’ kitchen table, Lloyd described his recent travels to Costa Rica and Panama, as well as his latest book, Builders of the Pacific Coast.

The book is a celebration of hand-built homes that he has visited from north of San Francisco to Vancouver Island off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The builders are all one-of-a-kind carpenters who use driftwood and other local materials to create eye-opening, jaw-dropping, and mind-expanding works of art—an open-ended category that embraces ground-foundation houses, saunas, boathouses, treehouses, woodsheds, playhouses, and temples.

The 1,200 images in Builders of the Pacific Coast speak for themselves. Over a two-year period, Lloyd checked out these homes and captured their essence in photographs and conversations with the builders. The taste we offer here may give you a flavor of the delightful creations lovingly represented in the book—including a roof shaped like gull wings, a door decorated with wrought-iron maidens, a sauna shaped like the belly of a whale.

Leaping out on page after page are craftsmanship, practical designs, sustainable materials, unvarnished and unexpected beauty, and unanticipated elements. “This is timber brought to a high art,” says Sim.

Surely, building codes are not part of the equation. Island living has its advantages.

One of the builders Lloyd showcases is a master craftsman named Lloyd House. As he observes in the book, “there was the slightly cosmic fact that when I find the numero uno builder in all my years of photographing houses, his name is not only Lloyd, but Lloyd House”—a patronymic, not a nom de plume.

Interestingly, the resurgence of interest in handmade homes occurred after Lloyd had focused almost exclusively on fitness books during the two decades that followed his initial foray into architecture. His discovery of these carpenters (or did they discover him?) echoes his earlier work—though the current product proves more refined and articulate, and certainly more livable and comfortable, than the raw and passionate abodes that expressed its hippie roots.

In the 1960s, the small cadre of post-war boomers to which Lloyd belonged was interested in more than green buildings. “We were into anything organic, Buddhism, and dolphins too.” It is clear that he is enjoying the recent proliferation of likeminded builders, many of whom cite Lloyd’s earlier work, Shelter, as a key source of ideas and inspiration.

Reviewing his initial efforts at green homebuilding and remodeling, Lloyd doesn’t theorize much. As he put it, “I never thought of myself as being ecological. If I could have found a nice house I could afford in Mill Valley, I would have bought it. I just needed to save money.”

Like most pioneers, Lloyd doesn’t think in terms of leading a movement. He does what he believes in. Decisions on which books to publish are made by heeding intuition, not return on investment. When selecting books, Shelter asks simply: Are we excited about the idea? Do we want to share it with everyone?

Accordingly, some of Shelter Publications’ work falls on the tail end of the spectrum, where print-on-demand is the perfect solution. I can say this for Lloyd: he does not operate out of fear of public opinion, or hope of popularity. After all, among the books he has authored is The Septic System Owner’s Manual. He handed me the new, revised, updated edition to take home. Hey, give me a break, it’s a book I actually need!

Lloyd is also a prolific blogger. His blogs offer a window into a worldwide web of connections and a perpetual-motion-machine life. Wherever he goes, his camera is tucked into his fanny pack, ready to capture whatever he’s discovering at the moment. In one of his blogs I came across this statement that reflects his deep motivation to search for, share, and celebrate what makes us humans in the natural world.

I actually love posting these blogs — it took a few years, but now it’s part of my fabric. I like telling people about what I find, because goldarnit, I run across so much interesting stuff.

As the afternoon winds down and our conversation concludes, I’m reminded of the title of one of Lloyd’s recent blogs, which says it all:

Notice of Intent to Get Irresponsible and Go Surfing

All images used by permission from Shelter Publications, Inc.