When the community elders of the Lama Foundation—a spiritual retreat on the site of an old New Mexico hippie commune where Ram Dass, the New Age heavyweight and author of Be Here Now once held seminars—decided they wanted to build a small guest cabin for students of their meditation program, they turned to husband and wife architects Stephen Eckert and Jade Polizzi, both environmental design professors at the University of Colorado–Boulder, to execute the project with a minimal carbon footprint. Partnering with 16 of their students, Eckert and Polizzi turned the design into a class project, and the end result is a far cry from the adobe brick and straw-clay structures that populated the place in its heyday. Could its old-school New Age founders have envisioned, decades ago, that the mandalas adorning the walls in their cabins would one day be cut by lasers, the knobs and hooks sourced from Anthropologie?
The walls and the built-in bed were made from Coloradan beetle-kill wood, while the post on the front porch came from a fallen Juniper tree near the site. The team settled on flame-retardant HardiePlank for the siding, because a fire had destroyed many of the commune's original structures a few decades back. All in all, they spent about $11K on materials, which, for those keeping track it home, is the same as one Japanese-inspired cottage and an eco-friendly micro-hut, a bit more than a Finnish designer's DIY cabin, and way more than both a certain bare-bones homesteader's paradise and one couple's many-windowed West Virginia retreat. Head over to Houzz for a closer look.
· Calm Yourself in a Former Hippie Commune's Tiny Hut [Houzz]
· All micro homes coverage [Curbed National]
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