Name: Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Location: Los Angeles, CA (Echo Park/Silver Lake area)
Years lived in: 13
Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen didn't set out to become back –and front!– yard farmers. But once this Los Angeles couple discovered the pleasures of making things by hand and living close to the natural world, one thing led to another and today their ever-evolving urban homestead (if we dare call it that) is a true inspiration in the heart of the city.
You may know Erik and Kelly from their blog Root Simple, their best-selling book The Urban Homestead, or even Erik's How To Build a Backyard Chicken Coop tutorial here on Apartment Therapy. The pair also have a brand-new book called Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, which is a wonderful handbook for household projects both small and large scale.
Touring their Silver Lake/Echo Park home, we were struck by the self-sustaining nature of their indoor and outdoor spaces. Bees pollinate flowers, which Kelly harvests to make lotions and salves. Erik nurtures seedlings that grow into vegetables – scraps of which are fed to the chickens and become compost. The 1/12th-acre lot is dotted with fruit trees, bee hives, a twig-burning stove, a rain barrel, a rooftop solar dehydrator, and compost bins (the couple admits the bins aren't quite "Dwell magazine material" but they are truly the heart of the operation).
Everything they grow is useful in some way, and they demonstrate the simple yet revolutionary acts of making their own beauty products, brewing their own drinks, and living with great awareness and creativity. Inside the house, the DIY spirit continues with a couch fashioned out of an old child's bedframe and artwork made by friends and local children. There is a seriousness to their post-consumer lifestyle but the couple clearly has a lot of fun, too – witness the brand new addition to their family sampling Erik's homemade beer (just kidding, folks!).
Since visiting the couple, our vision of our own home has definitely changed, too. We've been inspired to plant a few extra seedlings for our balcony garden, made flaxseed styling gel from a recipe in their Making It book (so cool!), and started dreaming of our own chicken coops and bee hives... One might not expect to find these things in the middle of LA, but Erik and Kelly show that it really can be done!
Re-Nest Survey:
Our style: Hoarder Chic.
Inspiration: Our friends' beautiful gardens.
Favorite Element: Our chickens, but the new kitten is challenging their position.
Biggest Challenge: Keeping chicken poop out of the house.
What Friends Say: "Can I borrow your sauerkraut crock?"
Proudest DIY: Our elegant dry toilet constructed with a milk crate and a five gallon bucket.
Biggest Indulgence: Expensive cheese
Best Advice: Keep new projects small, change your house and your yard slowly. Plant fruit trees wherever and whenever you can.
Green Elements/Initiatives: Greywater, composting, solar cooking, garden beds and edible landscaping, lots of home cooking, homemade cleaning products – really, our whole house is a green initiative!
Resources:
Food Growing: the work of John Jeavons
Beekeeping: Backwards Beekeepers
Humanure Composting: The Humanure Handbook
Fruit Trees: Dave Wilson Nursery
Lifestyle: Backwoods Home Magazine
Philosophy: Wendell Berry, Seneca
(Re-edited from a post originally published 05.06.11 - NM)
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(Images: Emily Ho)
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Very impressive. What are the strings over the chicken run area for?
Beautiful, but please please please don't brush with baking soda :(
love this tour! esp. the photo of the kitty + bottle -so cute.
Mariyaodessa, I dont know anything about brushing with baking soda....educate us?
Allison G, I think that's to keep them from escaping. Interesting idea.
I'm wondering what looks like a solar cooker is attached to on the backside.
the wires over the chicken run are to keep aerial predators away, if I remember correctly.
Love it. Very inspirational. But please make the pantry shelves a little more earthquake safe.
So many inspiring peeks. Would have been great to read a longer article. Their website is wonderful, but it's always to nice to see another facet. Hope to see more about urban homesteading at (and about) RootSimple.
Baking soda is too abrasive. True that everyone is different, and some people can handle it more than others. But if I wouldn't scrub ceramic cooking top with it (stove was horrible at the apartment), why would I put it on my teeth?
Here's a link to comments http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/diy-recipe/diy-recipe-toothpaste-066720
this is a great tour, so inspirational. just wish there were captions included with some of the pictures (i'm clueless to what some of the images are of ;))
This might be my fave home tour ever! their little homestead is so inspirational. Can they write a re-nest reoccurring feature? Or invite us all over ?
Beautiful pictures, I would also like to see some captions.
What a beautiful garden. Hopefully, in 13 years mine will look like that (minus the animals though).
Please - need some captions! Or maybe I need to buy their book and then I will be able to recognize everything ;-)
What are the yellow flowers in the photos?
Love love love! Can we have a more in-depth look at the kitchen? Digging those shelves.
I want to know more about their journey with their neighbors. How did they react, especially to the beehive? What did they say/do for their neighbors before/during/after introducing this stuff to the neighborhood? Did anyone in the neighborhood object, or was it all cool? I'm assuming they don't live in a place that has HOA's, but if they do, they are truly my heroes!
Unfortunately I live a semi-nomadic life, so this vision is kind of far off into the future for me.
So inspiring! Photos need captions though, as I have no idea what a lot of them are.
I want to know more too. Well done with this gorgeous garden, and it can be a haven for wildlife. Go anti-lawn, people. For the environment!
Great yards. Would love to see more of these on here but wish there were captions for the photos. Sometimes I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
I need a kitten bottle opener.
The urban farm looks great! I'm gonna guess it's not for the lazy.... like me. Very inspiring.
The yellow flowers are calendula, and the blue are borage.
<3 it- so, so, SO much!
wait, wasn't their kitten new like a year ago? Did you get a new one? So confused!
I'm always a huge fan of these guys and rootsimple, nice to see your space again!
fun and inspiring. way to celebrate Earth's treasures. m
Hey All--thanks for the nice comments. The flowers are indeed calendula (very easy to grow) and borage (also very easy). There's also some California poppies. Much has changed since Emily took these amazing photos. Due to some lead we discovered in the yard (sadly very common in the older parts of Los Angeles) we've had to redesign things a bit--I'm digging out some of the contaminated soil and putting in a raised bed for veggies. We've also planted a lot more California native perennials so that we don't have to plant annuals every year. Gardens change--it's looking a lot more sparse this year, but once the natives take hold in a year or two it will look nice again and take less work and water.
Kitten is now a year old--she's got a heart defect that can't be fixed and we're celebrating every day we have with her. We've since added another kitten to keep her company. And I get to see the author of this post every week now since we're both in the master food preserver program. Thanks again Emily!
Moving from a tiny apartment in Malibu, to a nice suburban house in Thousand Oaks next March. I cannot wait to start a little garden of my own. The weather here is too awesome not to grow veggies.