What makes a house a hippie house? Its the combination of several elements;

Simplicity - Getting away from the gross, overindulgence of a capitalist ideology.

Whimsical - Added curves and unusual embellishments.

Color- Anything with outrageous color schemes.

Naural Building - Using natural materials to construct. (SEe Natural Building for full details.)

Solar revolution - using the sun to make heat and electricity.

School bus conversions - Taking creativity on the road, rent-free.

Small is beautiful - the tiny house revolution.

Bio-mimicry- Using the surroundings as inspiration. fitting into the natural world

Hippie archetecture

We are surrounded by terrible architecture in this modern world. The concrete box has taken over our environments and is reflected in the way we think. Creative people are not creating main-stream culture but are pushed to the margins of society, and are challenged to create their own realities.

Hippie architecture is defined by these few parameters…

• striving to reduce human impact on the environment

• USING NATURAL, NON-TOXIC MATERIALS.

• INCORPORATING NATURAL LIGHT, PLANTS AND SHAPES.

• LOVE OF COLOR AND NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.

• TIny houses, rustic living and bus conversions

• RECYCLING CREATIVELY AND USING WHAT IS AVAILABLE.

• ECO-VILLAGE LIVING

Creating a community with like-minded people.

DESSEKILDE ECO-VILLAGE, DENMARK

DESSEKILDE ECO-VILLAGE, DENMARK

• whimsical

Timmyland- an example of breakingout of squares-ville and making your own reality.

It just takes imagination and a willingness to live differently

Creating hip communities and hippie architecture supports alternative thought and solutions to social, economic and ecological problems - humanity at its best.

The sanctuary artist community

Timmyland, also known as Ranchito Cascabel, is Tim Sullivan's folk-art fantasy located just north of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Inspired by the work of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain, Sullivan turned what had been a rustic sleeping porch and storage room into a rambling, otherworldly, fantasy home.

BIO-MIMICRY

The hip are culture creators and one of the powerful tools of a culture creator is words that embody new concepts. When we birth a concept and embody it in a word, we have a new tool. When we wield that tool, empires of old thinking can crumble. (See hip words for more ideas)

Today’s word is bio-mimicry. The idea is that nature knows best and if we want to solve a problem, either physically or socially, we should look to nature to see how it’s done. This idea goes directly against the powers-that-be which are rooted in the old paradigm of subduing the wildness to make the world ‘better’ hence more like a parking lot.

We, the hip-artistic-woke-weirdos, think this is drab and soul-numbing. This is NOT where we would seek food or shelter. So to counter-act this kind of thing, we look to nature. How can we make the world around us blend into nature rather than stick out? How can we incorporate nature into our structures to mimic the world around us?

What about our waste. Poop is a problem. We flush it down the toilet and right into the river. It’s gone, right? Another powerful word is permaculture- one of its meanings is the idea that there is no waste, everything has a use. It is the ultimate in recycling. So our poop is not something to rid ourselves of by pumping into underground holding tanks or flush into rivers, it is a resource. In bio-mimicry we can look at all the leaves on the ground -they compost and rot. Why can’t our discarded biomass do the same?

Wastewater is also not something to scorn. It can make a very lush garden, growing many water-loving plants. In Art Lugwig’s books about water storage and water recycling, he makes marsh systems that clean water and make the land beautiful.

Creating our world and not letting the unimaginative, rigid, capitalist regime be the only ones creating atmosphere is a form of protest and activism. Not only that, but we get to live in a world that feels healthier and more in tune with nature. Bio-mimicry- a protest, an activism, a solution, and a lifestyle.

THE REFINED COMMUNAL IDEAL

We started with a beautiful piece of property with a few run-down houses. Our vision of a communal community space was a given from the get-go. We bought this land in the late 90s and had four houses on it and we were a hippy family with no money. But one thing that we knew would work was if we rented out the houses, we could carry the mortgage. We always knew our baseline was covered.

It also became evident that a lot of people wanted to live communally; maybe not necessarily in one house with one kitchen and one bathroom, but rather have their own house and their own bathroom and kitchens. So we made all the outside space a shared communal yard and vegetable garden

The original house on this spot got remodeled (so to speak), basically rebuilt. It sits on the same footprint. We have 4 houses here on the land including this one. When we took this house down to rebuild it, the idea was to create a movement space where we could do yoga classes or dance or just have a place to play.

Now it's place to gather for lots of different things; we have men's groups here, women's groups, children's groups, dances classes and yoga retreats. It’s a communal space, except it’s connected to our house. Because of that, we limit access and have certain times available.

So, having a community dance space and semi-communal living was the vision for this space. We started to build the second story as the dance space but there's two things that didn't really work - the movement space should be on the ground level because of stomping. You wouldn't want that on the second story when you live underneath it. The other part was that we wanted the living situation facing the southwest to heat the house and to have the views.

We started dismantling the house and found that it was completely built old growth redwood. This house was built before plywood, so everything was sheeted with old growth one by- the roof, ceiling, and walls - everything was this amazing material of old growth redwood with 2 by 4 studs and subfloor.  We took the house apart, de-nailed it and stickered it. Hence, we had this amazing stash of this wood. It took a few months to take the house apart and carefully sort out all the materials that we knew we would use that later.  

Then we started from the ground up pouring the foundation and building the house. Later when we were working on finishing the house we used all this old wood for frames baseboards, ceiling, and window frames. We made all our windows and doors here on site.  We created this as an intuitive process.

Even though we drew it up with a 3D program to get on the idea of the spatial relationships and lode points of the house, the decorating was a playful process that just came through with lots of different people adding ideas. We all had different ideas, and I synthesized all these ideas. Many ideas showed up as we created this space. I called this intuitive building. For example, the position of the windows. Normally you build a wall on the ground and then you erect it and there you go, there is your openings for windows. But I feel you gotta look at the views. I decided to do differently. We put up the walls with a few framing members and a long header across the entire wall, all the way around to give us the ability to move the windows wherever we wanted.

I created a space with just some very minimal framing and then I started to envision what it be like to be in the space and where would I sit, where would I look out, where would I stand, where would I want privacy, where would I want an open space. We let the outside inform us.

 Once the minimal framing was up, we could modify it really easily and by having a continuous header around the top, it enabled us to put the windows literally anywhere. These windows here were to mimic the arc of the moon. We call it our lunar window scape.

We don't have any fences in between houses. We just let it be open and had fun with it. This invites a sense of engagement by being able to not be alone. We've been doing this for 25 years now and people have really been enjoying this. It works. There are no issues around the usual points of contention, which is kitchens and bathrooms. Everybody has their own, but we oftentimes share meals outside, and everybody makes food. It's an easy way to have community and especially with the kids running around.

The kids are actually the ones who draw in the communal aspect more than anybody because it invites the parents to collaborate to watch over each other's children. The kids get different experiences in different households. They don't grow up with the nuclear family, they grow up in multiple households with different rules and even different languages (since we have Spanish on the land as well). I see the kids getting a well-rounded view of possibilities of how to live in a family. It's going to be a natural part of them. They know our rules are a little bit different in this house than that house. I think that's a pretty healthy thing. so they don't grow up with just one thing.

And for the parents it allows them to drop out of the individual nuclear family thing. They say let's do this together. It lets 2 parents watch five or six kids while the other parents actually have space to do other things like do the laundry or clean the house or go shopping or have a date maybe. It becomes a coop, a cooperative to raise kids. There’s an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. There’s something true to that. For 20 years we have had multiple generations of kids running around going from house to house. Now our kids have stuck around and we have two grandkids living here with other young families to support them. We have a six little kids in the 7th on the way, living on this land. They're all within two or three years of each other so there’s gonna be a second polk of kids again, growing up together and learning from each other.

It gets them away from the screens – Hallelujah. There is too much TV. These kids actually learn how to be outside together by being on the trampoline, sharing tools and toys, and just being outside. They are connected to nature by being in the garden together or digging in the dirt. There are lots of ways to be active. They climb on trees, hide in shrubs, and find so many ways to connect with nature. Because of our country living, the kids open up and relax. I notice that kids get really antsy when they are inside, and the TV becomes the pacifier.  I get it. It works but it also creates its own set of problems but that's a different conversation.

Here, our open shared yard enables them to go out the back door and there will always be somebody to play with. I think it’s probably been like that forever, but we have forgotten because of how living spaces are organized. I’ve noticed in the 20 years have really resorted to helicopter parenting. My opinion is that kid’s activities are way too supervised. They have no sense of freedom anymore. They're constantly being monitored by the parents. Here they have a little bit more freedom around them. It is a little bit looser. it's just a general sense of safety for them.  Like maybe there is an argument, maybe they fall and bonk themselves but that is part of life. They know that they have security of other parents. This is really important because it's not just ohh Mama mama mama or papa papa papa. They can trust this person, or they can trust that person. To me, that's a good aspect to counter this hyper individualism that has been pushed on us just by circumstances.

It's not like everybody's equal and everybody has this shared responsibility because we are always the final say. We are the landlords and in the end we are responsible. We pay the utilities and garbage. But I try to release expectations of other people to live their lives. It's a good exercise for me. People are just being themselves and creating their homes how they want to create their space. We generally ask (but I think everybody gets it pretty quickly) not to have junk lying around. But people have their lives and their stuff and that's OK. It works for the most part, and hopefully, they stick around.

It's a letting go of trying to control.  It’s really easy to feel controlling for this place because we maintain it and have owned it for so long, and we understand what needs to happen. But letting people have their ways and making the gardens has been a great gift to me because people have different rhythms and different ways of doing things. It is constantly showing me that there's not just one way of doing things. So, this is what we offer – a rental house with communal yard and garden that is safe for children. It makes people feel empowered to do their own thing and to come up with different creative solutions and activities while being together. It works.