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Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman is among Woodstock's handmade house owner-builders. The original geodesic dome leaked, and he and his wife had to make room for their four children, including actress Uma Thurman, so he tore it down and built a second floor.

Artists and bohemians from Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe and Maverick arts and crafts colonies in the early 1900s inspired a second wave of handmade home builders in the 1970s. The Maverick Concert Hall, pictured, was built by hand in 1916. 

The late Harvey Fite, creator of the environmental artwork Opus 40, was also among the first wave of handmade home builders in the Woodstock area, and is featured in the book. 

Hidden in the cloves and dales of Woodstock and surrounding hamlets are a type of self-designed and hand-built homes that harken to the town’s hippie culture, and its early 20th century Bohemian era.

Woodstock Handmade Houses, as they are known, are truly one of a kind. Designed by their owners — not architects, not from kits — and built from local lumber, found materials, salvaged siding, mountain bluestone, and sometimes even mud, no two homes are alike.

Unlike a traditional clapboard house or log cabin, the design of these houses sprang from the owners’ specific needs and desires, be it a central woodstove, or a large picture windows facing mountain views, to their budget, which was often next to nil.

“There was a community of people coming up from the city who didn’t have any money and a lot of these places were handmade because of financial constraints,” says folk musician and handmade house owner Happy Traum. “There was an artistic aesthetic – people didn’t want suburban-style homes – they were looking for something earthy and that meant lots of wood.”

The first handmade houses were built by artists and bohemians from Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe and Maverick arts and crafts colonies in the early part of the 20th century.

Maverick Colony founder Hervey White built the Maverick Concert Hall by hand in 1916. The sculptor Harvey Fite, who dedicated his life to building the environmental sculpture Opus 40 out of a bluestone quarry, also hand-built his two-story wood house with a large upper balcony from where he could observe the changeable Catskill Mountains and his masterwork.

This handmade house was built around an old oak tree. Each home, reads the introduction of 'Woodstock Handmade Houses,' “was once a dream, a dream realized by imagination, hard work and the urge to build free and personally.”

(The house is still owned by Fite’s stepson Tad Richards, who recently was embroiled in a dispute with the nonprofit that operates the earthwork over his renting the house out to large parties and campers on Airbnb. The town of Saugerties has stepped in to mediate an agreement between them.)  

White and Fite’s tradition of craftsmanship of Woodstock houses influenced the hippies who moved to town in the 1960s. Among this second wave of NYCers, some — like the famous Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, father of Uma — opted for geodesic domes, others earth and mud construction. Others still incorporated living trees and Eastern or non-traditional architectural elements.

While it’s unknown how many of these houses were built, a selection were documented in the 1974 book of the same name by Robert Haney and David Ballantine (published by his brother Ian), all of whom have passed away. Haney’s stepson Jonathan Elliott took the photographs.

The cover of the third edition of “Woodstock Handmade Houses.” The book is now out of print, but several copies are available in the Woodstock Library.

Haney and Ballantine each built their own handmade houses in the 1960s in and around Woodstock, according to Haney’s stepdaughter, Jency Elliott. Haney’s handmade, post-and-beam-style house was on Glasco Turnpike and made with reused lumber from an old barn on Maverick Road and creosote siding.

“My mother loved the house and there’s a photo of us in matching coats sitting in the big picture window before the glass was put in,” she recalls.

As the story goes, the Woodstock book was inspired by a 1973 book that tapped into the same idiosyncratic building movement titled “Handmade Houses.” (Anderson Cooper recently said he was obsessed with it as a child.) Ian Ballantine liked the idea of publishing a similar book based on houses in and around Woodstock.

Haney and David Ballantine made contact with owner-builders around Woodstock, and Haney asked his stepson Jonathan, who was a teenager at the time, to photograph them.

“It was in the summer and we would go out in the morning and shoot the houses,” recalls Elliott. The cover photo of a tower on Cooper Lake Road built around a tree took the owner years to build. Another day they drove up to a commune where the members helped each other build geodesic huts.

The book itself has very few details about the owners or the homes themselves, aside from the images which evoke a bohemian, DIY, new-age-y aesthetic.

No handmade house was a solo effort. In the construction of Norman Cohen’s home, David Ballantine helped Cohen assemble the beams, as Bob Haney, who had broken his leg, pitched in from below along with the book's photographer, Jonathan Elliott, in overalls. “It was a real Woodstock event,” says Cohen. 

The houses’ appeal to the owner-builders was not just the “go your own way,” back-to-the-land spirit of the day, but the community aspect. No one built or designed a handmade house entirely by themselves. Often people enlisted the help of friends who were self-taught builders, not professional contractors, who would accept piecemeal payments and work with sketches instead of architectural drawings.

Sara and Norman Cohen had been renting a house in Bearsville in the summers when they bought land and started construction on their handmade house in 1970. Haney, a comic book writer for DC Comics, was the main contractor for the Cohens’ house.

“We chose all local lumber from the now-closed Shultis Mill. We didn’t have a mortgage. I would go out and do a picture and get more money to pay Bob to build,” says Norman, who worked in film production. (He says he saw the original 1973 handmade house book while in California and is the person who brought it to Haney.)

Meanwhile, Traum and his wife Jane started their handmade house journey in 1969 when they purchased land on Glasco Turnpike from Peter Whitehead, the son of Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall, founders of the art colony, Byrdcliffe. The Traums sketched out a two-story living room with loft and bedrooms on either side with their builder, who had just built his own house in Big Indian.

“We wanted something that would be part of the Byrdcliffe aesthetic. We sketched it out on a napkin in a coffee shop,” recalls Traum.

Their house (which can be seen on near the back of the book captioned “If all the good barns are already taken, there’s nothing to stop you from building your own”) was built in 1970 and they still live in it today.

“We didn’t have any money, so we did it a little bit at a time. My brother [Artie Traum] and I got a recording contract with an advance with $15,000 which we had to split and also give a commission to Albert Grossman, who was our manager. With $6,000 we put in a well and foundation.”

Furniture maker Stephen Robin made his first handmade house, pictured here, in 1970. A visit to Santa Fe inspired the fireplace. He sold it in 1989 for $189,000, and estimates that the second, most recent owner paid roughly $800,000 for the four-bedroom house. He still lives in Woodstock in a new, more modern handmade house, and continues to make custom furniture in his studio on Route 212. 

They used oak for the beams, and hemlock for the uprights, says Traum. “It came out not exactly square, but it’s very solid post-and-beam construction.”

They had three growing kids, so they had Haney and David Ballantine put on an addition to the back of the house. “They weren’t really builders, they were winging it,” says Traum.

Meanwhile the Cohens wanted 10-foot ceilings, with natural wood inside and out. An architect drew up plans for the basic bones and roof for Haney to follow so the house was structurally sound, but Haney designed the staircase and all the detail and finishing work around the windows.

While the Cohens’ house is about as far from the excess of Jay Gatsby’s fictional mansion in West Egg as can be, in 1973, Cohen’s work on “The Great Gatsby” film helped pay to finish his handmade home.

“After ‘Gatsby,’ I had enough money to pay Bob. I sent him the money and he did the staircase and the rest of the finishes.”

But it wasn’t just the two of them working on the house, it took the village to put it up.

“We had to lift these 6x12 beams fresh from the mill and we called on our neighbors and friends to help,” recalls Cohen. “It introduced us to the community of Woodstock. There was a whole group of us building and we all traded information and supported each other. It was wonderful.”

Cohen says when Haney broke his leg, David Ballantine helped Cohen put the roof on and others pitched in. “It was a real Woodstock event,” he says.

The roof raising, with Ballantine and Cohen on ladders and Haney and Elliott below, is on the last page of the book, along with a photo of the finished staircase.

Emilie Sinkler purchased the Cohens’ home and has made a number of upgrades over the years. Light switches that don’t belong to any light are one of its quirks. Also special: “Looking up at the ceilings and seeing hand cut and hand laid boards,” she said.

Today, Woodstock’s more ramshackle structures and communes are long gone, and the permanent handmade houses rarely come to market. In 2014, David Ballantine’s 1,480 sq-foot house sold for $255,000 to first-time buyers. Located off Route 212 in Bearsville, Laurie Ylvisaker, associate broker at Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty, says it needed updating, and the buyers knew they would have to put money into redoing the bathroom and replacing the single-pane windows.

Another handmade house, built in 1933 on Muse Road, sold in 2019 for $250,000 by the original owners’ son, who was in his 60s and had grown up in the house, according to Ylvisaker. That house was completely renovated and expanded and is now on the market, with a sale pending, for $825,000.

Often the houses remain in the family or among close friends of the original builders. Elliott took over Haney’s house around 2002, while living in New York City.

“My wife and I put fieldstone around the foundation and replaced the decks,” says Elliott. “We updated the kitchen appliances and replaced the butcher block counter with stone, and have plans to redo the bathrooms at some point.”

The Traums have had to redo a lot of their house over the years, and their architect son-in-law helped them modernize the house and update the kitchen, add a bathroom, entryway, and a sunroom.

“It was built on a shoestring, so the plumbing is kind of makeshift and the wiring wasn’t up to code. We didn’t have an architect saying you need a room here for the hot water boiler,” says Traum about the quirks and frustrations of owning a handmade house.

Happy Traum sketched out his home's design on the back of a napkin. He and his wife still live in their handmade home, pictured here, though his architect son-in-law has helped modernize the house.

But mostly there is the satisfaction of living for 50 years in a home they designed and their family grew along with. “The joy is from living in the place that we conceptualized,” says Traum. “And we have beautiful gardens and a landscape developed by my wife Jane.”

The Cohens also kept their handmade home in their extended “family.” After 30 years in the house, they decided to move to a smaller home nearby and sold to their goddaughter Emilie Sinkler, who already knew the house well since she grew up coming to visit with her parents.

“There’s a photograph somewhere of my father handing me as a baby up the ladder where the staircase is now to my mother,” says Sinkler. “One of my favorite things about the house is looking up at the ceilings and seeing hand-cut and hand-laid boards.”

Over the last two decades, Sinkler has added on a third bedroom and turned an office into an en suite bath in the main bedroom and hired a local friend to do the renovations. “I will continue to update the house while keeping its history intact,” she said.

There are quirks, like light switches that don’t belong to any light, a dirt-floored crawl space, and a stove that was most efficient in the 1970s, but Sinkler loves the reaction when guests walk through her front door.

“It appears to be a box in the woods, but inside they’re treated to a view of the mountains and the stream through floor-to-ceiling windows and doors,” she says. “I hope to pass it along to another generation who will appreciate it as much as I have.”

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