That Old-Time Architecture

June 5, 2020

Right now, any distraction is welcome entertainment. And my new neighbour Ysrael is constructing an old-fashioned hippie house with his wife or girlfriend. This counts as a successful distraction for me.

The heyday of hippie houses here was, I’m told, thirty to forty years ago. Land was ridiculously cheap, and there were virtually no zoning restrictions or building codes to worry about. However, most of those makeshift residences are long gone, blown down in summer storms or replaced by more substantial structures.

The house under construction.

In time, some of the not-so-purist hippies (many of them expats) abandoned the makeshift shack concept, and, sometimes aided by a little cash from back home, constructed nicer houses out of adobe brick or cement. These days, therefore, the shacks I see made of sheet of corrugated metal, and whatever big scraps of board that are available, are quite probably built by local people with extremely limited funds.

Ysrael, who is eager to be friendly (the hippie spirit continues here), recently bought a narrow triangle of land at the end of my lane, and showed up a month or two back with a mechanical excavator to dig out foundations. He also installed a chain-link fence to keep out the cows and horses that have long used that land as pasture.

Things went quiet for a time, probably because he couldn’t get back here through the town’s quarantine measures, but by mid-May he was putting up a skeleton structure using obviously recycled wood. The week before last, walls started being infilled, and a sleeping loft, a hallmark of a true hippie house, was mostly finished last week when parts of the roof were added.

Watching it go up has felt nostalgic to me, and recalls imagery from Whole Earth Catalog days. I don’t see any signs that more than two people plan to live there, so it won’t be like those communes that still, in places, linger in parts of the western US and a couple of locations here. But it’s beguiling to see a counter-cultural emblem going up at the entrance of my laneway.

A home in Mexico does need certain things, such as a reliable water supply and solid walls and roofs (I mentioned the storms, above). You can do without a lot of things, and no-one in this village owns an air conditioner. But water is essential for cleaning both dishes and people. Electricity here is reasonably reliable except during high winds or lightning strikes (did I mention we get storms here?), and I don’t think even the last purists want to live without it now. But washing machines and a lot of appliance-type possessions can still be left out of a proper low-carbon-footprint home.

My favourite house in the village – part Gaudi, part Tolkien, part whimsy.

I have to admire the neighbour’s energy. He and his partner, with help from a friend, have kept at it in hot weather, and say they’re determined to occupy the house by the time the rains start in a week or so.

At the same time, I look at the wooden posts that hold up the house, and wonder. Heavy rain and wood are not a long-term winning proposition. They’ve put up blankets to screen the sleeping loft for now, and I wonder if that could be in shreds by July.

And, it’s small. The house I built for myself, next door to where I now live, is scarcely 400 sq ft. That felt pretty minimalist, yet the house I’m writing about is about half that, including the loft and an outdoor bathroom. When the rains don’t let us go out for a day or two, that could get pretty confining

I hope it holds up, regardless of my concerns. Anyone building such a residence doesn’t have a lot of cash, but they have a dream. It might be one which the older hippies round here no longer heed very much, but it embodies an idealistic lifestyle concept that has largely faded, even as the need for it has grown. It’s certainly pleasant compared to one or two monster homes that have gone in around here in the past couple of years.

My least favourite local house. I thought this would be a hotel, but it’s a private residence.