In the mid-1960s, a wave of young idealists left the San Francisco Bay Area for the redwoods of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties and built their own houses with no training and no permits. They taught themselves to farm as they went. What they built survives in almost no record, because for decades they kept it that way on purpose: out of a reasonable fear of building inspectors and drug squads.
Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California is the record that finally got made. Photographer Michael Schmelling and writer David Jacob Kramer spent five years driving the back roads of those two counties, photographing what's still standing and talking to the people who built it, now in their seventies and eighties.
What was the back-to-the-land movement in Northern California?
The back-to-the-land movement was national, even international, but Northern California became its most concentrated home. A generation raised in cities and suburbs moved into the redwood belt north of San Francisco looking for something the Bay Area had stopped offering: space, quiet, distance from the drugs and exploitation that had overtaken the counterculture scene there by the late 1960s. They arrived with none of the skills the land required and figured it out by doing it.
Why is there almost no record of what they built?
Because they built without permits, on land often held informally or communally, using salvaged and scavenged materials. That kept the structures off the books in the most literal sense: no plans filed, no inspections passed. It also kept them off the radar of the law enforcement that periodically came looking for marijuana crops. Secrecy was a survival strategy, not an aesthetic choice, though it produced one anyway.
What did they actually build?
Houses shaped by whatever material was on hand and whatever the builder had picked up from a neighbor or a library book: cabins, additions grown outward over decades, structures that answer to no code because no code was consulted. Schmelling and Kramer treat them as architecture in the full sense, not folk curiosities: buildings that solved real problems of shelter, water, and light with no formal training behind them.
Why photograph it now?
Because the builders are old and the buildings are going. Only a fraction of the original back-to-the-landers stayed on their land into their seventies and eighties, and they're the ones who let Schmelling in. Kramer's oral histories, recorded alongside the photographs, are the other half of the book: the reasoning behind the structure, not just the structure itself, set down while it's still possible to ask.
The book
- Paperback, 496 pages
- 9 × 12 in
- 769 color and 15 b&w images
- D.A.P. with Edition Patrick Frey, 2026
- ISBN 9781636812298
The same instinct that sends someone into the redwoods to build a house with no plan is behind a lot of what gets mended instead of replaced. See our piece on what is boro for another version of the same idea: nothing thrown out, everything built or fixed with what's on hand. And if it's the archive of a thing nearly lost that interests you, Vintage Poster Scrap does the same work for a very different kind of ephemera.
Find Handmade Utopia and the rest of the shelf in our KNOWLEDGE collection.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote Handmade Utopia?
David Jacob Kramer wrote the oral histories and text; Michael Schmelling took the photographs. The book was published by D.A.P. in association with Edition Patrick Frey in 2026.
Where was Handmade Utopia photographed?
In Mendocino and Humboldt Counties in Northern California, where much of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and '70s settled.
Is this book about hippie communes?
It's about the architecture that came out of that world: houses built by self-taught owners over decades, documented through photography and interviews with the people who built them.
How many photographs are in the book?
769 in color and 15 in black and white, across 496 pages.
Who is this book for?
Anyone interested in owner-built architecture, the back-to-the-land movement, or documentary photography of vernacular building; it's an art and architecture book first, a counterculture history second.
sabi is an online boutique based in Portland, Oregon. Our KNOWLEDGE collection is the reference shelf, books on the things we sell and the ideas underneath them.