Save this story Save Story Save this story The trail to the first home Captain Rainbow built is overgrown and hard to follow; nobody has taken it for around fifty years. We joined Rainbow one afternoon to see if the place was still there. Leaving the car at the end of the dirt road, we waded into the brush, climbed over some fallen trunks, and carefully stepped across a mossy plankbridge, Honey Creek trickling below. Rainbow seemed to remember the way. In 1973, he had schlepped the materials for his home along this trail by himself, mostly wood from a disused chicken barn he’d bought for sixty dollars. We were technically trespassing, but nobody lives on this bit of land these days.
About a quarter of a mile in, the structure appeared through the leaves. Part of the roof had caved in, but the shake shingles Rainbow had hand-cut from nearby redwoods were still in place on the facade. We pushed open the front door, decorated with a window in the shape of a heart. Despite the scat in the corners and a nest of animals in the closet, it was easy to imagine how cozy it would have been back in the day, the mismatched bay windows filling the place with daylight.
This house had once been the site of an informal commune with no name, phone, or electricity. The fir trees are denser and taller now, making everything darker. Rainbow, seventy-three years old, touched the walls and twisted the knobs of the faucet. “We were in our early twenties, but we were like kids playing house,” he remembered. “We could build shit in the woods. BecauseI didn’t know what I was doing, I didn't know that some of the stuff I was doing was impossible, so I did it. It's really weird—why is it still standing?”
Half a century ago, Rainbow had participated in the greatest urban-to-rural exodus in American history. The “back-to-the-land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s saw a legion of new residents relocate to the backwoods of Northern California. Its traces are still out there. Most of the hand-built homes photographer Michael Schmelling and I visited to make our book Handmade Utopia were not only still standing, but still occupied by their original builders.
Back-to-the-landers were propelled in no small part by a renaissance of independently published, do-it-yourself guides to building a home in the woods. One of the most popular, Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton’s Shelter (1973), was an annotated scrapbook of traditional and experimental owner-built homes from around the world. It was so common to find a copy of Shelter on the shelves of the homes we visited that Schmelling began snapping a shot of each one’s condition, the pages battered, warped, and crusty from weathering the elements over the decades.
Shelter spotlit homes that look nothing like any I have ever personally lived in: vaulted ghorfa store-houses in Tunisia, yurts of the Altai Tatars, log barns in Utah, bird nests, spiderwebs, beehives. One home mentioned is that of an Indigenous Australian elder said to wander the Outback accompanied by her fifteen dogs—when the temperature drops at night, she lies on the ground and the dogs pile on top of her until morning. When she’s ready to move on, “Her smiling face appears as each dog gets up, stretches, and walks a short distance away.”
The notion of building a home with my own hands sounds as fantastical to me as living under a warm pile of dogs—as appealing as both might be. But in the years around Shelter ‘s publication, nearly a million young people did it.Today, there aren’t enough homes in America. Mortgage rates, rent, and inflation keep soaring. Back-to-the-landers had faith that an alternative was possible.
Assignment ID: 53678782h In 1972’s The Owner-Built Home , Ken Kern of Mendocino called bank loans “legalized robbery.” Banks, Kern wrote, “have been successful in reducing would-be democratic man to a state of perpetual serfdom,” Kern wrote. His words continue to resonate. Buying a home still typically means acceding to a set of exigencies, a commitment to a financial institution, a type of work for a set number of hours for a determined number of years—a certain kind of life.
In pursuit of something better, back-to-the-landers radically reappraised what a home could and should be—and how it might inform the lives of its inhabitants. Though the vast majority eventually retreated to more-conventional urban and suburban lives, a handful have stuck it out and remain on-the-land today. Their homes have evolved according to need and available resources, their means of construction reflecting their aspirations and dissensions.
This generation is now in their seventies and eighties. Their homes are remote, far from grandchildren and healthcare. Living off-grid is hard work. In rural NorCal, storms take down “widow-makers,” deadly branches that blockroads and wreck roofs. Climate change has meant more wildfires, longer droughts, and dried-up wells. The legalization of pot has caused a core source of the community’s income to shrivel. New buyers don’t always want the liability of a home built in defiance of building codes.
Many of these houses are strange and impractical, never constructed for their resale promise, anti-capitalistic to their foundations. It doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim a disused cabin in the thick of the redwoods. Communes tend to split up—and cooperatively owned land is tricky to sell. The wet produces mold. Woodrots. Windows sealed with plastic sheets (“hippie glass”) disintegrate in the wind. Pot-growing over the decades has unintentionally kept a lot of uninhabited structures from total decay—windows boarded up, they were made into sunlight-proof drying sheds. Many we visited still had steel wires crossing their lengths; our phone flashlights would catch an ancient bud or two dangling in the air.
The back-to-the-land movement is unlikely to be replicated today—the current price of land alone is inhibiting—but the audacious hope at its heart remains evergreen. Schmelling and I felt an urgency in capturing these homes before they literally went back-to-the-land, disappearing along with the generation who built them. At the outset of the era, these structures were showcased in books, but there’s little documentation of how they exist now, so many years later.
A few owner-builders we spoke to for this book have since passed away—and a couple of the homes shown here have already been demolished. Often,we simply arrived too late—given a tip only to find the builder had sold the property, or moved to an assisted-living facility, or died. Despite the challenges, the community is still buzzing. Every builder we spoke to had some development still in the works: a Chinese proverb we heard goes, “Man who finish house, die.”
This type of home accretes outer layers, the original structure absorbed into its center: windows that once opened to gardens eventually look into living rooms. Most builders never had plans, other than the plan to keep going. They began work before knowing the final form—or having the skills to get there. This design-as-you-build mode offers an improvisatory dialogue with one’s natural surroundings.“If an owl’s nest is discovered atop a distant tree, a tiny window can be added to frame the view,” Ken Kern’s follow-up volume, The Owner-Builder and the Code , suggested in 1976.
Some structures shown here have never been properly photographed before, owners fearful of attracting building inspectors or drug squads. There is no directory of owner-built homes; no formal histories exist for most of the communes we visited. The academic scholarship on Mendocino’s Red River Commune, for example, was written by an eight-year-old girl for a school project that the new owner found in a drawer upon acquiring the property. The young author describes an “Indian style” hot tub constructed from branches and mud, a total lack of electricity, and “five AM meditation sessions that brought everyone together.”
The region became overwhelmed with weed-grower opportunists in the 1990s: crop ripoffs and gunpoint robberies have resulted in some lingering neighborly paranoia. The suspicion of strangers—like myself—goes all the way back to the early days, when communes had to worry about “weekend hippies” invading from the city. Some back-to-the-landers left cities to hide out, having endured harassment by the FBI for anti-war and free-speech activism. Others fear retribution for their ongoing anti-logging activism: tree-sitting, blocking roads, and chaining themselves to bulldozers has frequently been met with police violence. It was not always easy for Schmelling and I to win owners’ trust. There’s still a sensitivity to how outsiders might judge their way of life. These are mostly rustic homes and rustic lifestyles.
“Voluntary primitivism” has been principle as much as circumstance. Other than cultivating weed, humble lives have been sustained through sundry hustles: salmon fishing, teaching, instrument-making, hawking firewood. Locals worried our narrative would echo a common one in media and academia—a movement that failed. This book, though, does not seek to evaluate the wholesale success of a movement, but rather to chronicle these homes as testaments to a noble quest. I never found the houses that have fallen into ruins to be gloomy. They weren’t built in pursuit of permanence in the first place. Over four years we took multiple treks up north, got ourselves lost on miles of dirt roads, sawed through a few branches blocking the way, and met more than seventy-five original back-to-the-landers.
Handmade Utopia isn’t a comprehensive history of back-to-the-land architecture in NorCal—it’s a way to reproduce the experience we had, wandering from home to home, meeting the builders, getting a tour, being treated to coffee or breakfast or a bag of weed, and learning how they built the structures we stood in. We wanted to share these voices as we heard them from their own mouths. I believe Schmelling’s portraits offer a lesser-seen version of older folks—fit, tanned, tough, and oddly content. Being none of these things myself, studying their lifeworks became a quest of my own.
The proliferation of owner-built homes in NorCal waned after the 1970s. But their impact can’t be gauged by counting their number—their message radiated beyond their walls. The commune scene was a cocooning of ideals that continue to permeate American society. The restoration and preservation of NorCal’s ancient forests and rivers continues; a California law passed in 2022 affirmed the right of private citizens to employ “cultural burns,” acknowledging the efficacy of the Native fire control technique. Organic food production isn’t just a hippie thing these days, and weed is on its way to full legalization across the country.
Hippie holism in the Fullerist sense has suffused the mainstream. Though isolated, back-to-the-landism as an architectural movement has had a global impact on sustainable design—no longer a fringe consideration. The California State Building Code now requires a minimum of 65 percent of the debris from construction and demolition projects be recycled or salvaged for reuse. Shelter , still independently published by Lloyd Kahn out of his Bolinas home, has sold more than 300,000 copies since 1973. Kahn continues to release new books on alternative living spaces, maintains an Instagram account sharing his favorites, and responds to DMs from young devotees. On YouTube, you can find his tutorials—how to shoot and vacuum-pack squab, or ferment pickles.
“These days, Shelter has become popular all over again, especially with twenty to thirty-year-olds who need a place to live and don’t want to get involved with banks or debt-saddling landlords and high rents,” Kahn wrote in the 2017 edition. “Even with all the changes in these [intervening] years—the book is the same, and the message is the same: Do what you can for yourself. Create your own shelter. With your own hands.”
On a few old communes, young people have “bought in” to become land partners. In the spirit of the culture, they’re adding on to the sprawling homes they’ve taken over. Preserving a home’s original integrity is antithetical to the principle that a hippie home is never finished. Few are likely to be maintained in the way of historical landmarks. Their fate may pleasingly square with the Anityatāsūtra, the Buddhist sutra of impermanence: “Alas, conditioned states are impermanent, subject to arising and decaying. Having arisen, they are sure to be destroyed; happiness is to bring them to rest.”
Maybe the true success of these homes is in emulating the ephemerality of the peasant and indigenous dwellings that inspired them, to be preserved in books (like this one). While making this book, we witnessed the community’s fidelity to their convictions: in their final years, they face their new challenges with a common sanguinity. If I lack this strength of conviction in my own life, I was moved to apply some of their tenacity to getting their lifeworks on paper. Their generosity in helping us complete this project speaks more to their communitarian values than any wish to celebrate themselves. The homes in this book are a testament to their builders’ commitment to constructing a different future, and their stubborn optimism to keep at it.
Adapted from Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California by David Jacob Kramer and Michael Schmelling. © 2026. Published by D.A.P./Edition Patrick Frey.
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