Man Builds Dream House from Recycled Timber
Disclosure: At no additional cost to you, you can support FLORB by using the affiliate links below When Geoff got right out of Architecture school, he bought a decent piece of land in BC, Canada, in order to get some experience in his craft and create his own home - the Fuego Retreat. At first, he only put up a tent to sleep in and a tool shed to keep his tools and work. All the wood in this building is from old buildings – which is one of the reasons it took him 14 years to build it. The wood for the structure, from an old convex arched building, came covered in nails and paint and all he did was buy a floor sander and go back and forth on it – many, many times. To set it all up, he only needed a crane truck for one afternoon. The house I built on 5600 square feet, with 6300 square feet of rooftop due to the large overhangs. Right in front of the house: The Grotto, a natural water bowl entirely out of rock. It was dug out a little bit when they were digging out for the footings and the rain filled it up – and never disappeared. They spent two months digging mud out of it and, eventually, it turned into a kind of pond with now 100 Koi fish in it. Each of the window panels got glazed and tinted by hand. The front doors are the first set of doors Geoff built himself, which he built around two pieces of glass that were rejects. The balcony over their top is held up by a tension member which was an old drill rod. In the roof there are 7 inches of polyurethane foam, which Geoff got as an off-product from a company that produced fire doors. He only paid around $4000 to insulate the whole building.
Inside, open spaces make the building seem even bigger. A rammed earth oven heats the place and sets the division between the dining and the living room. It is a great room with smaller divisions within it, with i.e. a sunken living room. One of the most challenging openings he did is a garage-door like window that slides up and gives an amazing bar-feeling. In the kitchen he installed a gorgeous stainless countertop. While this can seem to be an expensive affair, Geoff knew how to keep the cost for this one especially low by not welding it, running the sheet long and only cutting and bending it, then attaching the rail on the front. The drawers underneath it are made out of local apple tree and mahogany ply by a friend of his.
In a small corridor, something quite unusual: A penny floor. When the penny was abolished, Geoff went to a bank and got a bunch of them – precisely 12’584, which he built into a floor. He put a laminating epoxy resin under and over the top, squeegeeing it which left a micro film over the top of it. There, a door leads to Geoff’s garage and workshop, where he holds a wood boiler.
Upstairs is a big room, Geoff’s studio, that he considers his flexible space. It was important to him to have a room that you could change if you wanted to for different purposes – so he put cables on the ceiling in different directions, in order to just split it with curtains if required. The bed consists of a mattress on a set of benches he crafted himself for his wedding – a bunch of them, so he could just put up other beds when needed. The whole space is completely insulated from the other part of the house, a bit like a garage, and the rock the room is built onto keeps the room cool in summer.
Also upstairs, just above the living room, is another room with a second bathroom and a shower that looks like a time machine: It is made out of a three feet diameter sewer pipe. The challenging part was to get it smooth and nice looking on the inside – Geoff sanded it with twelve different grits, cut and polished it, until he was happy with the outcome. Initially, the room was separated by walls, which didn’t feel right, so he just took them down again in order to be able to see everything.
Geoff also built three amazing off-grid cabins not far away from the house. They are reminiscent of the original building he had first built up top, with no services but lots of glass and amazing views. They tried Airbnb and as people had already signed up for the cabins, they actually had to finish them and get them sorted. As according to the building code no building permit is needed for under 10 square meters, they kept it exactly that size. However, after a couple of years of renting it out through Airbnb, the district arrived and it took him two years to get past bureaucracy.
His favorite cabin is built onto a rock and doesn't touch the ground. It is supported from above with tension members with angle irons underneath attached on the rock, so that the rest is self-supporting. The whole cabin is all made of reclaimed cross laminated timber and nice, blue glass. For the design they had first figured out an appropriate layout for the glass and then built the whole cabin around it. As they didn’t want to cut the wood to the shape of the rock, they just left a small space, cut a sloth all the way along the rock and fed a mosquito net into it. This way the bugs stay out and there is natural ventilation.
He advises everyone to just move forward, to take decisions. According to him there is no point in spending half the time thinking about what you’re doing or how, otherwise it would be like sitting in a rocking chair: you’re moving but you’re not doing anything. He says that once you start in a direction, you will adjust and make changes along the way, learning a lot during the whole process.
“I think it's a really good idea to try to build a model or build something small first”, is Geoff’s advice, “don't start with something huge, start with something that is not going to cost you your livelihood if things don’t go right, learn on small projects. It's the little victories, and being able to stand there at the end of the day and go: ‘Wow that looks awesome!’, that's definitely one of my favorite things”.
