JOIN USPenelope Green finds out how a tech entrepreneur went about making a community in the woods with his friends. It’s now an experiment in episodic off-the-grid-living.
Five years ago, Zach Klein, a successful tech entrepreneur then in his late 20s, was living in New York City but dreaming of the wilderness. A former Eagle scout, partner at CollegeHumor and founder of Vimeo, an elegant online video platform, he was in between ventures, teaching entrepreneurship at the School of Visual Arts and spinning cycles, as he put it, while looking for land to buy — a lot of land — upon which he hoped to spend time building things and reconnecting to the scouting skills of his childhood. Most urgently, he hoped he could persuade his friends to come along for the ride.
Zach got lucky in Sullivan County, New York, where he found 50 acres of forest with an understory of ferns and mossy boulders, lightly accessorised with a rough-hewed, one-room shack-free from plumbing and electricity and a separate sleeping porch perched on a steep hill overlooking a rushing stream called Beaver Brook. The property belonged to Scott Newkirk, a New York designer, and much of its appeal lay in Scott’s aesthetic: His shack and porch were lovely enough to have been featured in New York magazine. After 10 years there, Scott was ready to move on, and for about $280,000, Zach had found his utopia.
Beaver Brook, as he named it, inhabits a nexus of themes: a millennial’s version of the Adirondack camps of the robber barons, the back-to-the-land movements and intentional communities of the 1950s and ‘60s, and a combination folk school or artists’ residency.
While hedge funders tend to express themselves in ever-bigger shingled simulacrums of early 20th century waterfront estates, those in the tech world who’ve enjoyed similar success may be more interested in experience, community and relationships, as Lane Becker, a founder of digital startups and the author of Get Lucky, a tech business primer on serendipity, pointed out.
“To the extent they want to spend their money, it’s on stuff like that,” he said. Lane and his wife, Courtney Skott, a furniture maker, were in Denver last weekend for a wedding, staying with a couple — a startup entrepreneur and a television producer — who had rehabbed a Masonic Lodge. “They Airbnb some of the rooms out,” Lane said, “less because they need the money but because they’d like to get to know different people. That’s sort of the model of what Zach’s doing. Some might see a sort of
hipster-twee affectation, but I think there’s a more genuine impulse at work.”
Inspired by manyZach’s inspirations are familiar: the writings of Stewart Brand, the ‘60s era eco guru and editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue; and John Seymour, the author of The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it, along with the architectural ideals of Christopher Alexander. Other touchstones included a maple sugar shanty he once
visited as a child, a community of Hobbitlike tiny houses called Trout Gulch built by some tech friends in Santa Cruz, California, and a yurt village built by a family in the Adirondacks.
But his pitch was pretty simple, said Courtney Klein, a digital strategist and
entrepreneur, who married Zach Klein at Beaver Brook in 2012. “It was, ‘Let’s get a piece of land and we could bring all our friends together and have a good time.’” And so it began. In August 2010, the couple hosted a weekend of “bonfires, contemplation and wood chopping,” among other activities. They cooked stew in the shack, now called Scott’s Cabin, for Scott, and which Scott had outfitted with a propane stove, and washed up by hauling five-gallon containers from the brook.
Some guests bunked in the shack and sleeping porch; others pitched tents among the ferns. The experience was the model for what would be a kind of weekend
commune, an experiment in episodic off-the-grid-living with a core of eight friends that has grown to about 20, including five children. There was Brian Jacobs, a sound designer and composer and Zach’s former roommate in New York City. He had been a junior Maine guide, and his proficiency with an ax served the group well. There was Jace Cooke, a founder of the tech startup Giphy, and other young creatives —
animators, app designers, musicians and filmmakers. Brian brought Grace Kapin, who worked in fashion, one weekend;
having survived that, they are now married and building a cabin there. Before long, everyone became handy with chain saws and other power tools; they brought in more experienced builders to oversee large projects and teach the group carpentry skills.
Learning from mistakes
There were rookie mistakes. An early project, a barrel-shaped tub, floated away one spring when the snow melted and the brook rose. Composting drew bears. The group made art on their camping weekends, including a winsome short film about building a stool from an oak tree, and took enticing photographs that looked like they had been art-directed by the editors of Kinfolk magazine. Since 2009, Zach had been collecting images of sheds, shacks, cabins and huts into a Tumblr blog he called, cunningly, Cabin Porn, and he also posted Beaver Brook’s embellishments, captured in those photographs, there.
Three years ago, Zach began inviting artisans like Tom Bonamici, a product
designer with an expertise in woodworking and timber framing, to hold annual weeklong workshops at Beaver Brook for paying students to learn building skills. Zach, whose latest endeavour is DIY, an online “maker” site for children, is keenly interested in turning Beaver Brook into both a folk school and an artists’ residency. After his first workshop, and at Zach’s urging, Bonamici, a gentle Oregonian with a passion for traditional Japanese timber framing, became a Beaver Brook resident.
Like all utopias, this one changed as it grew. It was three years ago that the Bunkhouse was built, on a piece of land across the brook with road frontage, electricity and a well. Camping in Scott’s Cabin or in tents strewn about the hill had lost its lustre, Zach said, “People got slower and slower about volunteering to do the dishes on cold nights.” And without power, Beaver Brook’s season was contained to the warmer months.
Yet there is some nostalgia for the time “before,” when there was no cellphone
coverage, Wi-Fi or hot water. This year’s Beaver Brook workshop project was timber framing, the foundation for an outdoor kitchen the residents hope will bring some of the action back to the Arcadian side of the brook. Six students paid $500 for Bonamici’s tutelage; the fee covered a week’s worth of chef-cooked meals and groceries. On the last night of the workshop, students and residents ate by candlelight among the sturdy framework they’d built. “It was like old times,” Zach said.
Bedrooms at the Bunkhouse, an airy open-plan house designed around the frame of a 19th century barn, are first come first served. Last year, 100 people, give or take, spent at least one night in the house. Over Labor Day, he and Courtney and Nell (their kid) were sleeping in a first-floor bedroom that has been outfitted with a crib, one of three separate bedrooms. Most of the sleeping options are communal: in an open loft space upstairs, there are two double beds; the Bunkroom, which is also upstairs, has eight futons on its wide-planked yellow pine floor. It’s Zach’s favourite place to sleep. “I love being up here with eight snoring buddies,” he said.
On work weekends, newcomers might be assigned grunt work chores like path maintenance. There’s an email chain, for planning projects and working out domestic issues. Laundry has been particularly thorny. With so many beds and no assigned rooms, the residents were struggling until it was suggested they bring their own sheets and towels. One resident offered to cross-stitch everyone’s names on their linens. Back home in San Francisco, the email chain is Zach’s primary online community, as he pines for his East Coast retreat.
Sunday nights are rough, he added. “It’s when everyone is driving back to the city from Beaver Brook,” he said, “and I get a flurry of photos of the meals they’ve made, or of building the cob oven, and I feel on some level I’m missing out on the life I made.”