Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art

Like one of the other reviewers, I too had the pleasure of living near and visiting several of the hand-made homes in this book. I lived up in the Pygmy Forest above Mendocino off of Comptche Road and some of my neighbors' beautiful homes are pictured in this book. I lived there during 1970 and watched many of these fantastic homes (and outhouses) being crafted using bartered and recycled windows, lumber and plumbing. One of the most beautiful houses was one with tall wood framed windows arranged in a wide half circle over-looking a dense fern covered hillside where wild purple irises would bloom. It was absolutely stunning to walk in through the hand-made front door into a warm and cozy kitchen and then walk to the left and out to the soaring living area. The kids had a loft that hung part way up the tall walls and the parents had the highest loft with a diamond cut out under their bed, so that they could just sweep the dust and dirt "through" the floor and then out the front door! Since they lacked electricity, it seemed like a workable way to keep their house clean. Finding this book many, many years after I had moved away, was like stepping back in time...a real pleasure to read!

I truly enjoyed this book. The homes depicted within were crafted with love and skill. I know a few of their owners, and played a small part in building one of them. It was a time of great ideals. Sure, we remained all too human. Even so, after 30 years, some of those folks still live in their beautiful Handmade Houses.

There is something warm and peaceful about this book. It is a transporter, ready to take you back to Northern California or Oregon of the 1970s. It is folk art and naked children--a time before Martha Stewart. It is an architecture of freedom and spontaneity, earthiness, and autonomy. Here people have put together woody structures of the mind and captured in form the feeling that I remember so well from my Northern California childhood in the 70s. The book is just photos--no building instructions, no pretense to being authoritative or comprehensive; art homes which caught the authors' eyes.

I bought this book about 9 years ago in a Wellington second hand bookshop and have been in love with the images contained within ever since. It provides an inspiration to me of the handmade house as a place of unlimited creative expression and a melding of the function and form of shelter into whatever it's creator is capable of imagining. Savour the images and let them seep into your subcouncious...who knows what journey they may set you upon.

I found this book several years ago at a library sale and all my friends enjoy the pictures of rustic cabins. It is certainly a picture book and not a how-to book but it has sparked many grand thoughts and converstations over the years. It's worth many a good slow look.