Lloyd Kahn – författare

Discover the benefits and joys of simple living in this coffee-table book that presents the homestead of Lloyd Khan and Lesley Creed.

If you’ve ever researched a DIY home-building project, then you’ve probably come across the books of Lloyd Kahn. If you’ve ever been curious about self-sufficient living, The Half-Acre Homestead is for you. Lloyd, the former shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, has published several books—including some of the most definitive titles on owner building, such as Shelter and Tiny Homes. Lloyd has showcased hundreds of builders in his books. Now, for the first time ever, he spotlights the work of himself and his wife, Lesley Creed.

Starting with a vacant half-acre piece of land, back in the 1970s, the couple built their own home, created a garden with vegetables and fruit, and began raising chickens, bees, and goats. This book presents every aspect of their homestead, from the kitchen and dining area to the shed and workshop. It also introduces several fascinating aspects of their lifestyle, such as crafting and small-scale farming. It goes on to cover cooking, foraging, fishing, birds, butterflies, and tools.

Book Features

Lloyd and Lesley have never paid rent and never had a mortgage. This coffee-table book is their story of building and maintaining their own home, over a 46-year period, on a small piece of land in Northern California.

If there’s not a nomadic revolution going on today, there’s certainly a nomadic movement. In the last few years, either for reasons of practicality (high costs of rent or mortgages), change in lifestyle, or the search for adventure, people are customizing all sorts of vehicles for travel.

If you search for “van” on Instagram, you find scores of accounts such as #projectvanlife, with 1.2 million followers; #vanlifecamper; 472,000 followers, or #fosterhunting, 930,000 followers.

This book focuses on DIY vehicles, with most of the 80 or so shown here fitted out for the road by their owners, similar to the way that the homes in all of Shelter’s building books were built by hand, by the owners. There are vans, sedans, trucks, buses, and trailers with a wide array of designs and styles. A number of the units are 4-wheel drive for off-road travel.

The book is not only fun to browse through, but is full of practical information (such as stoves, heaters, battery charging, solar power, refrigerators, and kitchens designed for the road) — for anyone wanting to create their own movable home. These owner builders describe their homes, provide photos and share their secrets. There are dozens of floor plans, all sorts of sleeping arrangements, and some unique “stealth vehicles” — designed to be under the radar, so that passers-by have no idea that someone is sleeping in a parked vehicle.

There is a European minivan outfitted by a young German woman who just graduated from architectural school and took a sabbatical to go surfing. There are a number of camper truck shells, all completely different. There’s a converted school bus that is used in both cold weather for skiing, and in warm climates (such as Baja California) for surfing. A $200,000 Land Rover and a $300 pickup truck camper shell. There’s a converted horse trailer furnished with Victorian antiques that is used at Burning Man. A tiny Geo Metro (3-cylinder sedan) that is ingeniously designed for sleeping, cooking, and eating in the stealth mode.

This is the the latest addition to The Shelter Library of Building Books, which started with Shelter in 1973 and includes Home Work, Builders of the Pacific Coast, Tiny Homes, and more.

This book couldn’t be more timely.

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me…”–Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Read the definitive, complete guide to shelters—more than 300,000 copies sold!

Shelter is so amazing, so revolutionary, that the best way to describe it is with one word: everything! It’s a history of architecture, a do-it-yourself (DIY) guide, a scrapbook, and a collection of essays and stories. If you’ve ever wondered about any aspect of houses, homes, or other simple structures in which people have lived, this is the book for you.

First published in 1973, Shelter remains a source of inspiration and invention. Including the nuts-and-bolts aspects of building, the book covers such topics as dwellings, from Iron Age huts to Bedouin tents to Togo's tin-and-thatch houses; nomadic shelters, from tipis to “housecars;” and domes; dome cities; sod iglus; and even treehouses.

Authors Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton recount personal stories about alternative dwellings that demonstrate sensible solutions to problems associated with using materials found in the environment—with fascinating, often surprising results.

Shelter is many things: