SunRay Kelley, the barefoot builder of fantastical handmade castles, yurts, temples, spirit lodges, tree houses, etc., died on July 16 in Sedro-Woolley, Wash. He was 71.
I first met SunRay at one of the Natural Building Colloquia, and you can read an article I wrote about this at greenhomebuilding.com.
Bonnie Howard, Mr. Kelley’s longtime partner, said that he had been suffering from cancer but that the cause of his death, in a hospital, was a blood clot from a recent operation.
Mr. Kelley was a master of handmade alternative and vernacular building — a building movement distinguished by its handmade ethos, sustainable features and natural materials, which flourished in the counterculture years of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Mr. Kelley’s whimsical, Tolkienesque designs were often featured on websites and blogs devoted to tiny houses and other environmentally friendly dwellings, as well as on television shows like the Discovery Channel’s “Building Off the Grid.”
“There was no one like him,” said Lloyd Kahn, “There’s no other natural materials builder in the world who’s combined such ecology, design and craftsmanship in so many buildings on the American landscape. He always said Mother Nature was his inspiration, which sounds woo-woo, but he really was tuned in to the spirits of nature. And his work wasn’t put together in some sloppy hippie style. They were extremely well-built masterpieces.”
His constructions were complex and improvisational; he worked from drawings, but he also worked spontaneously, evolving his designs in the construction process. “Evolutionary design,” he called it.
His buildings had undulating peaked roofs, or roofs shaped liked wings or the prow of a ship. They were often planted with sedum, moss and trailing nasturtiums (green roofs are naturally cooling). He loved cupolas and turrets. His preferred shape was the circle, which he felt was nature’s most resilient form.
He was a master of cob, and favored building materials that were scavenged and used as they were — unmilled windfall trees, gnarled branches, rocks and boulders. “God’s hardware store,” Mr. Kelley called the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where many of his buildings were made. “I’m going shopping,” he would say in the middle of construction, striding off into the wilderness.
He made some 70 structures, mostly in North America but with a smattering in Central America as well. The real showplace for his eclectic work and methods, however, was his own property, nine acres in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in a former mill town in Washington State that had been in his family for three generations, a homestead otherwise known as SunRay Shire.
There one will find the soaring, shingled “Sky House” and the funky “Earth House,” his first effort, with cast bronze hands that support the roof beams; a hermit hut built on the massive stump of an old growth tree; numerous ponds and waterfalls; and a collection of yurts large and small, including one sparkly pink number fashioned from cob flecked with mica and festooned with the sculpted forms of the female body; an enormous anatomically accurate representation serves as its doorway. This particular yurt was designed for yoga practice and he called it the Yogurt.
With his peaked felt caps, exuberant white mane and dreadlocked beard, dusted with bits of straw and wood, he presided over it all like a burly woodland wizard — except that instead of a wand he brandished a chain saw. A man constantly in motion, he wasn’t exactly accident prone, but he did throw himself into his work, and he nearly lost a few body parts in the process.
He was a sculptor first and a builder second, said Ms. Howard, who has collaborated with Mr. Kelley for two decades. She would look over his shoulder as he sketched and add function to the form: closets, for example, and light switches.
The couple met in 2004, when Mr. Kelley was building what might be his magnum opus, an exquisite retreat center called the Temple at Harbin Hot Springs in Middletown, Calif. Essentially an enormous yurt, it was made from straw bale and cob walls topped with an artful spiral ceiling and a peaked roof clad in shingles laid in a wavy pattern, like the ridges of a scallop shell. (The temple was razed by the wildfires that swept through Middletown in 2015.)
Ms. Howard was attending a workshop on cob and straw bale construction led by Mr. Kelley, the end result of which was to build the retreat’s walls. To make cob, fiber like straw is mixed with mud, either mechanically or by humans stomping it in with their feet. It was that method Mr. Kelley taught his students. Since Harbin Hot Springs is clothing-optional, they worked naked, which is more practical than the alternative, Ms. Howard said; it’s easier to wash mud off your body than your clothes. Ms. Howard said she fell in love with both the mud and the man.
SunRay studied drafting in high school and attended Western Washington University on a football scholarship. He studied art there but dropped out after two years and started designing buildings. When he showed his swirling sketches to a local builder, he later recalled, the man said, “You better get a hammer, boy, because nobody is going to build this stuff for you.”
SunRay adamantly eschewed footwear, believing that being barefoot was a grounding behavior that connected him to the earth’s energy, no matter the weather. Ms. Howard recalled buying him a pair of boots one winter early in their relationship, and coming home one blizzardy day to find the boots by the door where she had left them and a track of footprints leading away from the house and disappearing into the deep snow.
“Dessert first” was another mantra. Mr. Kelley’s habit was to eat dessert before dinner, and he did so with terrific gusto. “His line,” Ms. Howard explained, “was, ‘You never know when your bubble’s going to pop, so eat dessert first.’”
You can read the original article at www.nytimes.com
I was a resident at Harbin and friends with Bonnie and Sun Ray.
I was fortunate to have seen the beginning of the Harbin Temple from
the massive Wooden Beams that brought to mind Viking Ship keels,
to it’s opening, I snuck in early to test its acoustic properties with my Lowden O23!
Here is a short poem I wrote for Sun Ray.
♥️
Sun Ray Barefoot Again
Sun Ray Barefoot Again
Smoking Sumo Builder
Where Fire Is Not Allowed
John Wayne Walking
Across The Gravel Parking Lot
Toting A Chainsaw
To His Unfinished
Harbin Budokan.
The buildings SunRay Kelly built are quite zany!
A man of true vision and incredible talent. May his students continue to honor him by making many, many more structures from “god’s hardware store”! <3
Kelly,
Celebrities’ know unknown are celebrated in many ways Thanks for posting it sure brings joy and remembrance of a soul who strived for natural methods.
May his breed continue and we are with you in thick and thin
Kelly,
Such a nice story of our friends life!
Thank you so much for posting this…!
It sure brings a smile to my face and sets positive memories to be relived!
May all his relations celebrate his life and heal thru grief as well as lost love is ok to be felt .
May he be in bliss along his way!
Thank you Sunray for all the goodness you have shared!!!!