Mike Breen House, Big Sur, CA / Copyright 2012 Kodiak Greenwood

How would you define a handmade house, opposed to a house that’s custom-designed with custom-crafted elements?

Like the Arts and Crafts movement, the handmade house is more of an approach than a style. Beginning in the late 1960’s, the label “handmade house” began to be loosely applied to the mostly-salvaged-materials creations of certain west coast countercultural designers and builders (architects, artists, journeymen carpenters, and novice do-it-yourselfers) who’d begun to protest not only the period’s political, social and environmental challenges, but also the prevailing trends in capital-A architecture. In the new corporatization of architecture and design, in prefabrication, in factory-made mass production and machine-made precision, they saw modernism’s failure. Brutalist architecture, they felt, was the icing on the cake. In response, they turned to farm and ranch symbols like the nineteenth-century west coast pole barn. (The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing, and these builders sought inspiration and ideas from the noble architecture of farmers.) They also sought to revive aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement. No longer was it acceptable to buy factory-made shingles, for example. Now it was deemed desirable to take the time to split the shakes by hand. I call it “slow” design and construction. You have to keep in mind that architecture and design, especially on the east coast, had become entirely over-intellectualized, and the designer/builder of the handmade house was seeking to restore old-world qualities such as feel and soulfulness.