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With over 1,000 photographs, Shelter is a classic celebrating the imagination, resourcefulness, and exuberance of human habitat. It includes a history of shelter and the evolution of building types: tents, yurts, timber buildings, barns, small homes, domes, etc. There is a section on building materials, including heavy timber construction and stud framing, as well as stone, straw bale, adobe, plaster, and bamboo. The spirit of the ’60s counterculture is evident, and the emphasis is on creating your own shelter (or space) with your own hands. A joyful, inspiring book.
By Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton
176 pages / 11" x 14½" / 1973 / ISBN 978-0-936070-11-7
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Home Work is our sequel to Shelter and illustrates new and even more imaginative ways to put a roof over your head, some of which were inspired by Shelter itself. What Shelter was to ’60s counterculture, Home Work is to the “green building revolution,” and more. From yurts to caves to tree houses to tents, thatched houses, glass houses, nomadic homes, and riverboats, each hand-built dwelling finds itself at one with its environment, using natural materials.
By Lloyd Kahn
256 pages / 9" x 12" / 2004 / ISBN 978-0-936070-33-9
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Come take a trip with us through the world of tiny houses. See firsthand the current trend in scaling back, reducing living expenses, and escaping bank mortgages or high rents.
There’s a grassroots movement in building smaller homes these days. The real estate collapse, the economic downturn, and the growing scarcity of resources, have caused a sea change in thinking about shelter.
Here are some 150 builders who have created tiny homes (under 500 sq. ft.). Homes on land, homes on wheels, homes on the road, homes on water, and homes in the trees. There are also studios, saunas, garden sheds, and greenhouses.
Here is a rich variety of small homemade shelters, with 1,300 photos, along with stories of people who have chosen to provide their own roofs overhead.
By Lloyd Kahn
224 pages / 9" x 12" / 2012 / ISBN 978-0-936070-52-0
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These homes move! There are some 90 tiny homes here, either rolling on the road or floating in the water. About half of them are lived in full-time; the other half are used part-time, for trips of varying lengths upon life’s highways and waterways. This book follows our best-selling book Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter and describes nomadic life in the 21st century.
In the wheels category are vans, pickup trucks with camper shells, house trucks, school buses, trailers, and cycles. In the water section are sailboats and houseboats.
There are some 1,100 color photos here, along with descriptions of each and every home.
This is a book full of joy, adventure, and high spirits. It is rich, colorful, and imaginative, and these competent and artistic owners/builders will inspire others with their unique homes and lives.
By Lloyd Kahn
224 pages / 9” x 12” / 2014 / ISBN 978-0-936070-62-9
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A unique style of carpentry has developed over the past 40 years along the west coast of North America. This book, three years in the making, features photos and interviews with builders from San Francisco up the coast to Vancouver Island, BC. From unique homesteads on the California coast, to communities of owner-built shelters on small islands in the Strait of Georgia, to beachfront houses on the “Wild Coast” of Vancouver Island, these structures are creative and unique. Over 1,200 photos.
By Lloyd Kahn
256 pages / 9" x 12" / 2008 / ISBN 978-0-936070-43-8
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This book is about homes that are larger than “tiny,” but smaller than the national average. It’s a logical step for Shelter Publications after our two books on tiny homes.
Compared to the average American home, small homes are less expensive, use less resources, are more efficient to heat and cool, and cheaper to maintain and repair.
These are (but for a few) between 400–1200 square feet of floor area — less than half the size of the typical new American home. (By way of comparison, homes in our book, Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter, averaged 200–300 sq. ft.)
The homes here — some 65 of them — vary from unique and artistic to simple and low-cost. Some are plain, ordinary buildings that provide owners shelter at a reasonable cost — and some are inspiring examples of design, carpentry, craftsmanship, imagination, creativity, and homemaking.
By Lloyd Kahn
232 pages / 9” x 12” / 2017 / ISBN 978-0-936070-68-1
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Lloyd Kahn has been producing books on building for 50 years now and here, for the first time, he relates his own building experiences.
The Half-Acre Homestead is a record, with over 500 color photos, of Lloyd and his wife Lesley’s owner-built home and garden. They show you what the house and garden look like, how various functions (solar panels, septic systems, skylights, etc.) operate, and tools they use in the kitchen, garden, and shop.
There are recipes and sections on fishing and foraging.
There are descriptions of raised beds, raising chickens, and collecting rainwater.
There are photos of Lesley’s quilts, weavings, and baskets.
Also shown are flowers, vegetables, birds, and spiderwebs.
There is advice for anyone thinking of building a home these days.
by Lloyd Kahn & Lesley Creed
Softcover / 168 pages / 8.5” x 8.5” / 2020
ISBN: 978-0-936070-81-0
500 color photos
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Lloyd Kahn has been hiking and camping on Northern California beaches for the last dozen or so years and, given his background in publishing books on building, it's only natural that he would notice the unique and whimsical beach shacks constructed by anonymous builders.
Here are some 60 structures, shaped by materials lying on the beach, and ephemeral in the sense that they are built without nails, and don't last long ― victims of wind, waves, and high tides. (All of the ones depicted are now gone.)
There are also photos of beach sculptures, seaweed, seashells, birds, sea lions, whalebones, waves, surfers, fishermen, and sunsets, as well as photos from a 3-day backpacking trip along the remote "Lost Coast."
A book for beachcombers and beach lovers everywhere, all of whom share a deep love for the ocean and its surroundings.
Hardcover / 160 pages / 8½" x 8½" / 2019 /
ISBN 978-0-936070-80-3
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Fascinating and unique, Wonderful Houses Around the World gives children a welcome entrée into other places and other lives throughout the world.
Glorious two-page photographic spreads capture families outside their homes, be they simple or imposing. Detailed cutaway illustrations reveal the inside of each house, showing the various family members engaged in typical daily activities. Captions explain where each house is located, the environmental conditions that affect the house design, how the family lives in the home, and their possessions — all providing interesting glimpses of life in other cultures.
The ten houses profiled include a red mud dwelling with thatched towers in Togo, a yurt in Mongolia, a steep-roofed, shake-covered house in Transylvania, and a large donut-shaped communal building for 300 in China. This book increases children's wonder about and cultural awareness of the many different people and ways of life around the world.
48 pages / 7.5" x 10" / 2004 / ISBN 978-0-936070-34-6
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.
This book covers some 80 DIY vehicles, with most of them fitted out for the road by their 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.
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 cold weather for skiing and in warm climates 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.
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
By Lloyd Kahn
272 pages / 8½” x 10” / 2022 / ISBN 978-0-936070-89-6