Long before anyone thought of the term ‘green building’, there were handmade houses created with sustainability, respect for the land, and the pride of creating something by oneself as high priorities. Such handmade houses have been around since the dawn of man, but they saw a resurgence – and a new wave of creativity – starting in the 1960s.
The home shown above is one of many featured in the book ‘Handmade Houses: A Guide to Woodbutcher’s Art.’ Now out of print, this cult favorite features everything from tiny cabins to gigantic treehouses, all made by hand in Northern California in the 60s and 70s.
Dug into a hillside in Wales, this low-impact woodland home combines some of the aesthetics from those California homes with partially underground ‘Hobbit House’ feel. Mud and tree trunks from the property, as well as lots of straw bales and lime plaster, were the main materials used in addition to plastic roof sheeting, wooden pallet floors and junkyard finds like windows and wiring.
Built primarily by a man and his father, this handmade woodland home was built with just a handful of common tools like a chainsaw, hammer and chisel. All told, it cost just £3000. Plans and many more photos are available at the website.
Another low-budget but charming eco dwelling is Steve James’ Scotland home, which bore a price tag of roughly £4,000 along with a lot of hard work and ingenuity. In fact, James says he could have saved about £1,000 if he had cut the wood himself instead of going to a sawmill. It took the software engineer about 10 months to build and he now has a website, envisioneer.net, which guides others through the process.
Back in the ‘70s, a man named Michael Reynolds began building what he called ‘earthships’ in New Mexico, self-sufficient passive-solar home made out of recycled and natural materials. The central building blocks of these off-grid homes are recycled car tires filled with local soil. The tires, along with recycled glass bottles and aluminum cans, absorb heat during the day and radiate it into the homes once the temperature drops.
Eliphante is a handmade home built by Michael Kahn and Leda Livant in Cornville, Arizona beginning in 1979. Kahn and Livant created the home over 28 years using mostly found materials. As the couple stacked stone, created complex driftwood arches and glass mosaics and arranged recycled and reclaimed materials in free-flowing patterns, a shape reminiscent of an elephant emerged – hence the name.
Eliphante is a work of art in itself – a strange, meandering, dreamlike work of art peppered with the surreal and incongruous, like the astroturf that lines the yard. See more photos at Eliphante.org.
Perhaps the strangest of the many amazing handmade houses in the world is the ‘Mystery Castle’. One day in 1927, Boyce Luther Gulley got some bad news: he had tuberculosis, and if he didn’t leave Seattle, it would kill him fast. Gulley walked out of his doctor’s office and disappeared.
Then, fifteen years later, his daughter was contacted by a lawyer in Arizona: she apparently owned a home there. Gulley had spent the remainder of his life creating an 18-room mansion made of stone, adobe, car parts and other natural and recycled materials. Furthermore, when he left Seattle that day, he walked all the way to Arizona. His daughter had asked him shortly before his diagnosis if he would build her a castle, and he did.
