Whimsical Forest Village Built from Raw and Reclaimed Materials

Sun Ray Kelly an artist and architect from Washington that creates spaces unlike anything else on earth. While does practice carpentry in his work, he’s more concerned about the art and the beauty that he’s trying to convey in the structures that he builds.

The latest structure we've built on the land is called the temple. Like most of Sunray’s work, this structure incorporates several natural building features like the straw bale walls. Out the outside it has an earthen plaster. When they dug out the pond next to it, they had plenty of earth to build with, so they took all the soil out of that and put it on the wall. It has a living roof which also has lots of straw on it. It's like a double layer of straw with two layers of pond liner. One of the things that he tries to do with his art is to create a feeling of motion and movement. According to Sunray, nature eplores a straight line, so he uses it as little as possible in work. He tries to use curves as much as possible, as to him, they mimic the human form, and other features found in nature. He really dug into the sacred geometry of the spiral and how the spiral is how energy moves. 

In a lot of his work, he doesn't really feel like he’s just building buildings anymore. He's creating ‘energy vortexing machines’ that ‘transform human consciousness.’ For Sunray, Nature is the greatest artist, nobody else is as good as nature and so whenever he can borrow from nature and use her in his art, it becomes much more powerful. Some of the other features of the Temple is that it has a radiated heated floor in it. It's heated by a wood-fired mass heater that heats the bathtub and water for the floor. 

The stove is down drafting so that when they light a fire and get the chimney warmed up, they can pull the fire through this sort of maze which goes up over an oven through a heat exchanger, which heats the water down under the bathtub and then goes up the chimney. It's a way of getting a lot more heat out of the fire. 

Then there is the old dome in the center of this structure. They basically live in the circle around the old dome and inside it's more of a just a special place. The dome is made of cedar that he cut into boards thin enough that he could bend them. It was a process of just bending boards and first make a circle, a ring out of laminated wood on the ground, and then about nine feet up there's another circle that he make out of laminated boards, and then on the top there is a hub so that all the bent boards are held in an arch shape. It makes a beautiful dome and a swing, c cause he likes to swing around. Kids love it. 

The Sky House was his second major house on the property. He he started building it around 1982, moved into it in 1988, even though it was still not finished. It started out to just be small and then it just kept mushrooming up and growing as he added to it. 

When Sunray isn’t making houses, he is often tinkering with vehicles, like his electric tricycle. It weighs a hundred pounds and goes 65 miles an hour. Another is this solar diesel-electric hybrid. It's a net gain vehicle in the sense that it’s designed to make more power than it uses in the year by collecting sunlight, and it has an electric drive motor so that when your solar charge runs out, you can run on diesel, biodiesel or veggie oil using an on board generator. This is one of his masterpieces, but also an ongoing project. It's a very comfortable little house in there, it’s very roomy and they love it. 

Everything in life is about practice. If you want to get good at something you practice. You want to improve your skills, you practice. It's almost the answer to everything you want to do is get out there and do it. Little steps lead to big steps so that's how you start. Challenge yourself, do something and then those gateways will open, those valves will open and then the floodgates will flood you with immense more creativity than you ever felt possible. 

He built the Garden House in 1998, and it got its name mainly because it was built right in the garden. He was going through his divorce, needed to move out, so he moved in the garden and built the house there. It's a very solar house with its giant windows that provides the space with a lot of solar gain. It's a fairly efficient house in that it doesn't ever get too cold or too hot. It's shallow, so that the light penetrates the whole house, so he can sit there in the winter and stay warm. The sun reflects off this glass so he actually gets two suns heating him all the time on this deck, so the deck never gets very cold.

Sunray thinks that his biggest accomplishment, however, was building the pond because he’s been able to affect the ecosystem greater than anything else he has done. He created the ponds, the frogs came, he planted the fish, the eagles came, the herons came, the otters came. All these creatures come to eat from the ponds and so he got this tremendous amount of life. 

One  of his favorite parts of the property is down in this forest. It's where he comes to get his inspiration. There is the little stump house there, as well as one of their little Airbnb cabins. He has lived here his whole life. He grew up on this land and one of the first things they built was Stump Houses. They would go and they would go inside these giant cedar stumps which were absolutely amazing and make little little fortresses. 

One of the oldest buildings on the property is their sauna. It is about 30 years old now.  Not far from it is one of their little tree houses, which he built mostly for fun. Thirty years ago a guy brought him this roll of rope that he got from the dock for anchoring huge ships in the water down in Seattle. He was always trying to think of something to do with the rope, and then he came up with this idea to build a suspension bridge. 

Sunray’s advice is to let the love in your heart flow. Forgive everybody and move forward in the  present.

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