Lloyd Kahn: Access to Tools

2025-08-27

Bolinas from a road overlooking a group of surfers in the ocean An overlook in Bolinas, CA with a view out to the surf break.

Ever since I found Lloyd Kahn from this video about his Bolinas home by Kirsten Dirksen, I was hooked. His approach to living, architecture, and knowledge sharing felt so pure and genuine.

Lloyd is most known as a publisher. He was the Shelter Editor for the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s and 70s. The catalog was a compendium on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, community, and "do it yourself" (DIY) topics that stoked the counterculture flame. The slogan for the publication was succintly "access to tools".

In Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he summed up the Whole Earth Catalog's effect on the culture of the 1960s/70s:

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation ... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."

Lloyd's books along with his blog are chock-full of quality knowledge of home building, travel photography, and best-practices for a good life.

I always return to a video or book of Lloyd's to get a pulse of inspiration. Wherever you land through a Lloyd Kahn rabbithole, be it a blog post, book, or video, it'll make you smile.

Here are some of my favorite quotes by Lloyd:

"If you don't know where to start, just start."

"You have to find the line between the modern world and craftsmanship."

"The key to designing my happy home, really was designing a happy life. And the key to that, lay not so much in deciding what I needed as in recognizing all the things I could do without."