<p><strong>Book report: Woodstock Handmade Houses</strong></p>
<p>We’ve decided to start writing about the books that have influenced us in our life or music, in little book reports on our blog, in hopes that they might inspire you like they have us.</p>
<p>-Beth Tacular</p>
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<p>About seven years ago, I was scanning the shelves of one of our local used bookstores, when I spotted a spine that read “Woodstock Handmade Houses." I grew up kind of glorifying the whole town of Woodstock, NY, after taking an elective class in middle school about the 1960s, in which I learned all about music and LSD and counterculture movements. I remember as a twelve-year-old watching a movie about the Woodstock Music Festival and deciding right then that I wanted to be like those people dancing in the mud to Jimi Hendrix, and if psychedelic drugs were responsible for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club and The Yellow Submarine, then they were good enough for me.</p>
<p>So flash forward to 2005, skipping right over my own experiences with mind altering substances, and we find me in the bookstore, pulling out this book. Phil and I had just come back to North Carolina after a summer of squatting for half a year in an abandoned one-room-schoolhouse in South Carolina, where I’d been making art and where Phil had started writing all the first Bowerbirds songs. We were trying to decide where to put down roots next. </p>
<p>And then I found a book about hand-built houses. This book started a little fire under my heart, a little fire that grew over the next year and a half until it had burned down all the other apartment-renting, house-buying and other vagabond-y ideas that had formed there, leaving only the need to build my own house, with Phil.</p>
<p>In the months after reading Woodstock Handmade Houses, we drove around the country living out of our minivan, which we’d set up with a loft, and in which we carried a tent, setting up shows here and there. On our travels, we slept under the stars and collected and read many other books about house building and living off the land. We started dreaming of moving back to the country, where we’d be able to build our own home for much less money than buying or renting one that was already built. We wanted to tour and put out albums as Bowerbirds, and we knew we couldn’t count on that as enough of a source of income to pay a mortgage or rent an apartment. This book would point the way.</p>
<p><strong>Woodstock Handmade Houses</strong> is a picture book, really, with beautiful photos of dozens of very imaginative and stunning homes, all built by back-to-the-landers, artists, musicians, furniture makers, and general countercultural folks living in upstate New York in the 1960s and 70s. They built their homes out of pieces of older buildings, or out of the wood they found on their land. Most of the houses are very modest in size, but gorgeous in design. We spent hours flipping through the pages and getting ideas.</p>
<p>There were houses shaped like teepees (above), tall skinny houses only accessible by a drawbridge-like walkway, houses that spiraled up around a central tree to a tall tower in the middle, and homes with plaster walls and hand-built furniture arranged around a cozy hand-sculpted fireplace. This was what dreams were made of.</p>
<p>Eventually, we couldn’t take it anymore, and we found some cheap land outside of town, and a $900 AirStream trailer, and we moved out here to start building our own small dream home and workshop in the woods. A workshop that’s almost finished and ready to <a href="http://kck.st/SxZEg2" target="_blank">record our new album inside of.</a></p>
<p>For anyone who is also considering building their own home, or for someone who just likes looking at pictures of really creative structures, try to track down this book in a used bookstore near you.</p>
<p>For more about our hand-built house, art studio and recording studio, <a href="http://kck.st/SxZEg2" target="_blank">go here</a>. Ours may look a little less whimsical than some of the ones in this book, but it does have a trampoline, and two balconies, and a trap door to the roof, where there will one day be a roof deck with a zipline down to the art studio and a tree house where visiting bands can stay, and a wood-fired hot tub. One day…</p>