The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
It’s funny how remote a neighboring island can feel, even if it’s just a short flight on a puddle jumper from Oahu. The more PC term “neighbor island” has eclipsed the one previously used, “outer island,” but both clearly denote a perspective: the “other” land masses sitting away from the Big Smoke, with the capital’s legislative and industrial nucleus.
On the particular sleepy neighbor island where I’ve just landed, there are no stoplights, zero fast-food chains, and few restaurants, although the scenery of its lush windward and sunbaked leeward sides resembles its sisters in the Hawaiian archipelago. I also get the feeling that although I might be a fellow Islander, I’m instantly made. Everyone knows I ain’t from around these parts. Nothing slips by the community.
I pick up Jay Nelson, acclaimed artist and woodworker from San Francisco by way of Los Angeles, from the small local airport to visit an off-grid home he built here, commissioned by a local named Galen McCleary. Primarily known in the surf and design worlds for his fantastical wooden tree houses, boats, and campers affixed to vehicles, Nelson creates structures that are uniquely and immediately recognizable—spaces dreamed by a boy, yet built by a man. From art installations to podcast studios and sitting rooms to complete home builds, they are almost always unpainted inventions, often angular, sometimes asymmetrical, part geometry equation, part Bright Tree Village of Endor from Star Wars.
The home we’re off to see is his third completed full build, admittedly his largest and most ambitious, mainly because of how difficult it proved to build on the island. From photos I’d seen before boarding the plane, the home itself, however, is a clear testament to Nelson’s growth as an artist and builder.
He hasn’t been back in nearly a year, and he has a few custom light fixtures left to install. Save for a few grays in his stubble and the crow’s feet proving his fatherhood and surf time, the 43-year-old Nelson looks like a big kid. Not in the way he dresses, but in the life he exudes: his spirit and curiosity, the glow in his eyes, and the wild, untamed mop of sun-fried hair grown out like a full summer had passed since leaving prep school.
Heading east down the small “main” road, Nelson tells me that, in late 2018, McCleary approached him by chance at a fish market in San Francisco. McCleary, an environmentally focused business consultant and the manager of his family’s 14,000-acre ranch here on the island, had been following Nelson’s work for years, particularly impressed with a small home Nelson had built in Hanalei, Kauai, that received media attention from several outlets. McCleary wanted to commission Nelson to build a similar-sized cabin for him on a certain piece of land where he’d grown up. While Nelson wasn’t completely sold on the idea, McCleary convinced him to come and see the property, and, as Nelson says, one look was all the convincing he needed to be all in.
“Initially, I just wanted to design it, not build it, you know?” Nelson explains. “I knew it’d be a project where I’d have to spend months away from my family, and I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted. But after coming here and seeing the property with my own eyes, I knew it had the potential to be one of the great projects of my life.”
Both McCleary and Nelson wanted to build a home with as little carbon footprint—and as little an eyesore on the pristine, undeveloped stretch of coastline—as possible. “I understood that there’s a huge responsibility, because this is a place that was just beautiful landscape before this house was here,” says Nelson. “We definitely didn’t want people to feel like we scarred the landscape. We wanted it to fit. No paint on the outside, all natural, recycled materials. You’ll see that there’s a spot you can view it from the road, and it blends in really well to the rock and vegetation. We tried to nestle the home into that spot as we were building and even decided to drop the roofline a few feet to hide it even more.”
They also built a skeletal bamboo structure before setting the foundation, so they could view the space from afar and from various vantages in order to see what the footprint would reveal, how high it would be, and what the visibility would expose. As a result, its present roofline tilts with the wild grass and ironwoods around it, mimicking the windswept angle of the prevailing trade winds.
The build took nearly two years. See: remoteness. Nelson and a small crew of two or three assistants would fly over for a few weeks to a few months to power it out, shipping over the materials in a Matson container. Sometimes, because of the limited stock on the island, they’d be short a nail or two and have to pause for a few days or a week before beginning again, seeing who might be coming over from Oahu to bring them supplies. The foundation was especially brutal, as no cement truck could get access to the location. Thus, they poured it by hand.
For the longest stretch of the build, Nelson flew his wife and two daughters over for a spring and summer—a bit of a Robinson Crusoe–style situation and lifestyle, for better and worse, considering the minimal social activity the island offered. Due to those stints of residence, Nelson appears to know the island well. He directs me to continue east, rolls down the window, closes his eyes, and breathes Hawaii back in. At one point, he instructs me to slow down when passing the fisherman living on the side of the road, one of many unspoken yet widely understood codes you find in small Hawaiian communities, but that most mainlanders might obliviously violate. He waves hello to no one in particular, and a guy throws a shaka back. Nelson marvels aloud at this interaction.
“How cool is that?” he says. “That’s the way it should be, right? Coming here, I knew that I’m an outsider and only understood the tip of the iceberg as far as the community and culture. But Galen, he grew up here, and I used him as my advisor in a way. I feel like he understands the balance here, which is super important to me, being respectful to that. To add something new to a place where there isn’t anything—there’s a kind of profound responsibility to that.”
Of course, there’s a difference between building a tree house on someone’s property and an actual home.
We continue farther and the road gets tighter, the sun sinking with the dusk. It’s almost night when we veer into higher ground, the road twisting and turning, gaining elevation as the land around us cools. Nelson glares out of the window to identify the first of a few gates blocking a series of unmarked dirt roads.
“Oh, wait, I think we just passed it,” he says, and we back it up.
We ramble down a random rocky path, and, from a few lights in the distance, the black space between us and the dots feels like an ocean channel between two islands. I hear waves crashing in the darkness.
“There’s a surf break right here with a good left,” Nelson explains. “During the build, if spirits got a little low, getting in the water was always good for morale.”
“Did they often?” I ask, chuckling.
He grins.
“Well, the foundation almost broke us.”
We arrive at a small dirt clearing to park, and I almost miss sight of the home completely, the slope of the roof tucked right beneath the angle of the hill line behind it, just as Nelson had described. He leads us inside, and I immediately see traces of his style in the entrance, despite the darkness: windows that are functional for terrestrial views—but also built for seeing with one’s third eye.
He opens up the sliding doors to present an angular lanai looking out to sea, but the first thing that hits me is the intoxicating scent of the space. It’s a wondrous symphony of wood, as if the inside of a ski lodge and freshly collected driftwood made love in the understory of old-growth redwoods.
“God, the wood smells good in here,” I say, astounded, closing my eyes to breathe it in.
“I don’t even notice anymore,” he says, shrugging with a smile, then scurries away upstairs to the loft bedroom.
I walk out to the deck of the lanai, reminiscent of a ship’s bow. The wind is dead, magnifying the echo of surf lapping somewhere against the boulders below. Unlike on Oahu, the stars are plentiful and vivacious and so much closer, like you could lick the Milky Way on your tippy-toes. I hear the creak of wood, the slush of surf, the bark of a monk seal, and it feels as if I’m on a vessel floating through the cosmos of a Neruda poem. Like, Love is a journey with water and stars… Like, Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet… Far away the sea sounds and resounds… This is a port… Here I love you…
The following morning at the kitchen island, we flip through Nelson’s journal, a book of sketches he carries everywhere, the same one he’d drawn in to sketch plans for this very space, its numerous fixtures, fittings, furniture. It also includes other full builds a future owner—with a certain amount of imagination, nerve, and cash—might one day call their own. And there are some on the horizon.
“Thinking about the effect that a house has on someone’s life, or a kid growing up here, the effect that would have on them—that’s pretty neat,” Nelson says, turning a page. “A house can be so uninspiring and almost depressing. You can walk into a house and feel that. Or you can walk into a house and feel so inspired and excited.”
Perhaps Nelson’s structures evoke this essence to make up for lost time. For a period of his life, one during which most children avoid home to stay outside, he was trapped in one: At 13, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“I spent basically two years inside because of that,” he says. “When you’re a 13-year-old, your friends are kind of everything, and because of the cancer, I had to spend a lot of time alone. I was homeschooled during it, but I also got into ceramics and then really into shaping surfboards. I wasn’t very good at school, but really into art, and had a passion for dreaming up things. That was the start of all this.”
Nelson’s mother was an art teacher and encouraged his newfound interests. Drawing turned into woodworking. After kicking cancer, he began building tree houses and, simultaneously, surfboards in the garage—shaping, glassing, and sanding them on his own.
“With surfboards, I dunno if they’re necessarily an art or more a kind of craft,” he says. “They’re something else, though—definitely some magic in them that’s intuitive.”
He’d continue to shape boards into his twenties before moving to New York for a spat to paint. “I wanted to be a painter, but then building took over,” he explains. “I feel like what you want as an artist is to inspire people and show them a different perspective, and I feel like buildings do that way more than a painting, to me. It’s also easier to sell a building. Paintings are hard to sell, you know?”
I nod, and the man of the house, McCleary, pops in, asking if there’s any coffee left. Just in from a hunting trip to Colorado, where he schlepped a dismantled elk for 23 miles on foot, processing the meat the same night, McCleary had spent the evening at his mother’s home, a short walk farther down the dirt track. As the hunting trip might suggest, he’s a man’s man: back like a bull, Popeye forearms, paw-like hands that have drawn a bow and pointed a rifle, rides anything on two wheels off-road and any craft in the ocean just as aptly. A former college wrestler at Stanford, he helps coach wrestling at the high school across the island every week, pro bono.
Sitting on stools Nelson made from local woods, I pick McCleary’s brain about what drew him to Nelson’s work.
“I think I’ve always just loved the way Jay was able to, like, paint with wood,” he says, before ushering me outside and walking me around the property.
In the light of morning, I get a better look at the entrance and how the roof above the foyer seems to float like a giant, lifted trapdoor between two sides of the cedar shake A-frame, whose eaves nearly kiss the ground. The lifted roof, frozen over a symmetrical triangle of parallel 2-by-4s, appears to beckon you in.
Other secrets and architectural Easter eggs reveal themselves, outside and in. Windows of various shapes and sizes double as picture frames, enclosing brilliant views of other neighbor islands that morph with a viewer’s angle of sight. A hidden outdoor shower here, a perfectly placed reading nook there. Custom wooden light fixtures that add another layer of levity to the clean and modern interior.
“He has a special talent in creating these amazing textures and images that bring wood alive in a beautiful way,” McCleary says of Nelson.
Originally designed as a smaller 350-ishsquare-foot bachelor cabin—similar to the Hanalei build that McCleary had swooned over—the floor plan changed as McCleary and his wife built a life together, including the possibility of growing their family in the future. As it sits now, the home is about 1,500 square feet, not including the 900-square-foot basement/ outdoorsman cave below the home.
“I feel like the whole building process was like that,” Nelson says. “We didn’t have these architectural renderings that were specific down to material. There was a very organic flow to it. The vibe was to build with this space, rather than what we wanted or imposing our will. It was like design in motion, you know? To me, that’s the natural building process. It’s pretty unnatural to make a plan two years in advance and then build it exactly to that. Like, if you’re creative, you want to make changes as you go, right?”
Looking around the home, it’s quite astounding that every piece of wood is salvaged. The framing materials are mostly 100-year-old second-growth redwood. Nelson knows a guy in the Bay Area who has contacts throughout Northern California with access to redwood being discarded or removed from houses. Nelson gets wood that most people look at as trash, resurfaces it, planes it, and cleans it up—revitalizing it. In fact, every piece of wood in this structure is recycled or reclaimed. And while it would have been impossible to build this place with local wood, most of the furniture was crafted on the island.
More or less hand-picking every piece of wood for this entire build is indicative of the level of care, meticulousness, and attention to detail Nelson’s structures are known for. “I worked for a Japanese builder for a while in my late twenties,” he says, “and I’d watch him go through every single piece of wood, put tape on it, and write something like, ‘This is the post for the kitchen that will face northwest.’ So, when I think of the wabi-sabi aesthetic—letting materials grow old with integrity or age naturally and be what they are—I really get into that, thinking about what every beam does and where every piece of wood should be. I don’t know if that’s wabi-sabi, but letting the materials speak for themselves, as opposed to the Western way of doing things… not fighting nature by painting everything or caulking stuff and trying to keep nature out.”
“Let the wood patina,” McCleary adds.
McCleary was certainly helpful and hands-on during the build as well, Nelson says. One of McCleary’s many tasks was processing and sanding all the recycled wood that was shipped in. There was one situation where they were attaching the ceiling boards, and, it being a particularly wet summer, it poured shortly after, staining the wood. McCleary got on a huge ladder inside with a young kid named Ernest and spent a week sanding every piece, Sistine Chapel style.
There’s no shortage of sun on the property, so solar PV powers everything with batteries hidden down in the garage. For insulation, they sourced a hemp material that’s far less toxic than the normal pink fiberglass foam. Freshwater comes from a well up at the ranch and also from a river, fed down to the house by gravity.
We walk another dirt track, toward McCleary’s mom’s place, toward the sea, and arrive at a small cove with golden sand and translucent water hinting at a fun wave, a scene that could grace the glossy cover of any travel magazine. Nelson and McCleary hop in to cool off, and then McCleary scales a 30-foot-tall coconut tree, barefoot, chops out six, and tosses them down. I hadn’t even known he’d had a machete on him. In three hacks and two peels, he hands me a nut to drink and sashimi-like cuts of the soft white meat.
“Being out here,” he says, “being as self-sufficient as possible, that’s something I value for sure and is one of the reasons I continue to live on this island. A lot of people who live here are subsistence living, and 80 percent of their protein is coming from the land and sea. You’re kind of forced into that, of course, by being remote. But, as far as a home here, there’s a plenitude of natural resources. Most of the choices we made make sense in a place like this.”
Nelson will be staying a week to finish up some odds and ends, but I’ve got to catch a flight back to the Big Smoke. I make the hour long drive along the coast back toward the small airport, the home’s woodsy fragrance still titillating my senses, seeing the island’s beauty in the full afternoon light. I’m careful to slow down when passing the folks fishing or living, or perhaps it’s both, on the side of the lonely road. A local man notices the gesture and replies with a shaka. I smile and wave back.
[Feature Image by Mariko Reed]
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