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Page 3 Text: In the mid-'80s I went up to the northern California coast to shoot pictures of a house my ex-Bolinas neighbor Jack Williams had built (see p. 32). Jack was a surfer/fisherman/gardener who had had the foresight to get a 39-acre piece of land in Mendocino County in the early '80s. He had built a house and homestead on forested land.

After I shot photographs in the morning, Jack said he had a neighbor who wanted to meet me, who had used our book Shelter in building his place, so we drove through hills, then down a winding hillside road into a river-bottom valley. At the end of the road was one of the prettiest little buildings I'd ever seen. Everything about it was right, the curves, the white plastered walls with shingled roof, the copper and crystal mast. We walked up to the open doors of the shop, and a 60-year-old guy, with a handmade hat and a twinkle in his eye came out, a tattered copy of Shelter in his hand. "Look," he said beckoning me to squat down with him in the doorway to his shop. He opened the book to the painting of a Mandan earth lodge, and had me look up at the framing of his shop…identical!

The quality of Louie's construction was astounding. Everything was beautifully designed, and immaculately carried out. It was all tuned in, thought out, crafted finely. This wasn't Fine Homebuilding. This wasn't fussy craftsmanship for millionaires. It was a rare combination of owner-builder-designer-master craftsman, all to a human and livable scale. There was no excess, no fat. This guy made everything: house and shop, chairs and stools, garden cart, cabinets, wood-fired water heaters, hydroelectric system, photovoltaic electricity; he was not only a master carpenter but an arc welder and could figure out how to construct just about anything. He was in the midst of building a beautiful wind-powered fishing boat with his buddy Pete.

Well, that was his shop. And his house? On the other side of the river, and also inspired by a drawing in Shelter, was a Japanese-style pole house. To get to it in the winter, you had to ride a bosun's chair across the river on a 500-foot cable (see p. 8).

It was seeing Louie's shop that inspired this book. If Shelter could inspire buildings like these, we had better do another book! On these eight pages are some of Louie's creations.