This story aired in the December 3, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
Eighty-nine-year-old Lloyd Kahn is a legend in the Do-It-Yourself home building scene. His 1973 book Shelter is considered one of the seminal works in the genre.
Kahn lives and still works out of a half-acre homestead in Bolinas. His work is now on exhibit at the Bolinas Museum.
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Story Transcript
REPORTER: Lloyd Kahn arrived in Bolinas in 1971 and initially bought a quarter-acre plot for $3,000.
LLOYD KHAN: I looked at a house, there was a house down the street here that was $17,000 and I thought, ‘Well, I can build a better house than that for $17,000.’
REPORTER: And he did. He wasn't alone. Kahn says there were 30 or so people building their own homes in Bolinas at the time.
[Sound of outdoor Bolinas]
REPORTER: Kahn initially built a geodesic dome here that was prominently displayed in Life magazine. But Kahn became disillusioned with domes. He came to the conclusion that they were wrong for housing. So he tore his dome down and built a traditional stud frame house covered with redwood shakes made from driftwood he gathered on the beach.
He also used wood flooring salvaged from a Navy barracks on Treasure Island and discarded doors and windows from high-end house renovations in San Francisco. Kahn was dumpster-diving way before the phrase was coined. He bought the adjoining quarter-acre plot and over the years he kept expanding the house.
KAHN: This is the pantry.
[Sound of door opening]
KAHN: So, grains and jam and storage in here. Flour grinder. Those are oats.
REPORTER: His property in Bolinas includes a big garden, a greenhouse, a separate building that used to house his book publishing business, and a workshop where he still tinkers.
KAHN: Wheels, nails, screws, tape, velcro, leather, electric. Plumbing’s all down on the floor over here.
REPORTER: I’m momentarily stunned by the sight of two dead birds hanging from a line on his porch.
REPORTER (to KAHN): Who’s this?
KAHN: Oh, these are a couple of pigeons. I got one this morning, I got one yesterday. I hang them for two or three days and then, they’re really good.
REPORTER (to KAHN): When you say you got one…
KAHN: Shot ‘em with a pellet gun. I come from a duck-hunting family so I started hunting when I was a kid and I don’t have any problem with that.
REPORTER: It was at the home his father built in the Sacramento Valley for duck hunting trips that Lloyd Kahn started building. He was 13 when his father enlisted him in the construction crew.
KAHN: I still remember the day they said I could nail the roof down, the sheathing on the roof. They gave me a carpenter’s apron and a hammer and nails. I remember kneeling on the roof and the sunshine and the smell of the wood. ‘Oh, I like this.’
REPORTER: Kahn grew up in San Francisco during the 1930’s and 40’s. He was an All-American kid who used the whole city as his playground. He’d jump on the cowcatcher at the front of a cable car where the conductor couldn’t see him and ride all over the city. He went fishing off the Hyde Street pier, catching perch that his mother cooked for dinner.
Kahn attended Lowell High School in the days when no test was required to get in. As a student at Stanford in the mid-1950’s, he spent a lot of time surfing down in Santa Cruz. In the late 50’s Kahn ran a newspaper at an Air Force base in Germany. When he returned to civilian life, he joined the family insurance business with his brother and father.
But in 1965 at the age of 30, Kahn was restless. He wanted to figure out what to do with his life. He knew that he loved working with his hands, and that he wanted to build. So he took a month-long leave from his insurance job and hitch-hiked to the East Coast. It was a time when the counterculture was exploding.
KAHN: All this stuff was going on, you know, building your own house, growing your own food, the green revolution, organic gardening, Buddhism, you know. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. Astronomy, astrology, the I-Ching. Things from other cultures that I didn’t learn about at Stanford in my study of western civilization. When I quit the insurance business, I got a pick-up truck and I thought, ‘Oh, man. I don’t have to wear a suit any more. I can wear Levis.’
REPORTER: Kahn spent the late 1960’s building a post and beam house in Big Sur and domes in the Santa Cruz Mountains for students at an alternative high school. During that time, he also worked as an editor for the now-iconic Whole Earth Catalog, a large format publication with a photo of the earth taken from space on the cover.
Debuting in 1968, The Whole Earth Catalog featured product reviews, essays and articles about innovative technologies and DIY projects. It was described by the late Steve Jobs as “Google in paperback form.”
JOSEPH BECKER: I remember flipping through it as a kid, saying, ‘What is going on here? This is so cool.’
REPORTER: That’s Joseph Becker, an architecture and design curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
BECKER: There’s everything in this thing. You can do anything with this. It’s like a manual for life.”
REPORTER: Becker’s counter-culture parents kept a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog at home.
BECKER: And it was influential to me as a 16 year-old, you know, rebuilding a Volkswagen Beetle, kind of based on that same thought process that the information is out there to accomplish what you want, even if you don’t have the direct knowledge to begin with.
REPORTER: In 2021 BECKER saw a small display focused on Kahn’s work at the Architectura Biennale in Venice, Italy, a major architectural gathering. The European curator and architect behind the exhibit said they wanted to recognize Kahn’s dedication to sustainable building and remind audiences of the importance of the DIY philosophy trumpeted in his books.
Becker – who spends a lot of time surfing in Bolinas – had promised the Bolinas Museum that he’d curate an exhibit. and after seeing the homage to Kahn in Italy, he decided Kahn's hometown museum should have a display, too. In addition to Kahn’s books, The exhibit features about a dozen small models of structures you can see in the pages of Shelter.
The book shows Bedouin tents, sod igloos, treehouses, timber frame buildings, stone structures, straw bale construction, adobe dwellings and bamboo homes.
KEVIN KELLY: People all over the world have been doing their own shelter forever and this book came along and it gave them permission to make their own home. And that’s often a radical idea for most people and that can be life-changing.
REPORTER: That’s Kevin Kelly, who also worked on The Whole Earth Catalog and went on to co-found Wired Magazine.
KELLY: One of the adjectives I would use to describe Lloyd is enthusiastic. He has a level of enthusiasm for living, for new things, for discovering things, for doing new things that is very infectious. All his little adventures and his trials and experiments he reports with great cheerfulness and enthusiasm and shares.
REPORTER: Kahn shares videos and photographs with thousands of followers on Instagram and Substack.
[Sound of zipline]
REPORTER: Including this zip line ride across a river in Mendocino.
KAHN: The river is really high. Okay. Can you believe this? And here we go. Every time I do this….
[Sound of Youtube video of Kahn ziplining]
REPORTER: It was the only way to visit his friend at home.
REPORTER: But DIY advocates, including Lloyd Kahn, acknowledge that it’s now harder to build your own home because of costs and regulations.
KAHN: Nobody’s building their own home anywhere in Marin County that I know of. And I know very few, if any people, even in California, building their own homes now.
REPORTER: Kahn regularly shares videos of recently built DIY shelters with his thousands of social media followers. And for people living in cities or close to major metropolitan areas he has other advice.
KAHN: What I tell people now is look around in the city or in a town for a house in distress. You find a house. It’s got a good foundation but the roof needs repair. You’ve already got water, sewage and power. And so, you buy it for maybe $300,000 instead of $900,000 and you fix it up.
REPORTER: Kahn says that every time he comes into San Francisco at least two or three people recognize him with his walrus mustache and long white hair tucked under a baseball cap. It’s become something of a ritual to have a stranger approach him and say that reading the book Shelter back in the day was a career-changing event. And it’s not just that single book that has altered people’s paths.
KAHN: All those books are out there in circulation. 300,000 copies of Shelter and 120,000 copies of Tiny Homes and 45,000 copies of Builders of the Pacific Coast and they’re circulating and a lot of people will look at those books and say, “You know, I think I can do that.” And they do. That’s the most gratifying thing about all this work that I’ve done.
REPORTER: Kahn may offer excerpts of his autobiography, Live From California, to paid subscribers of his Substack newsletter. He expects to write a new memoir about his life as a builder who learned along the way. Kahn is adamant: he has no plans to stop working.
KAHN: I can’t imagine what it would be like to retire. You know, I’m not retiring till I take my last breath.
REPORTER: Lloyd Kahn will turn 90 soon. Based on the longevity of his parents, he says he expects to be around for at least 10 more years.
Here's a link for information on how you can see the exhibit in person at the Bolinas museum