GRAPHĒ: Windows Boated Over for This Hawaiian Cabin Were Brought to Shore on—What Else

The out-of-time Molokai home by designer and builder Jay Nelson was an exercise in characteristic improvisation.

Jay Nelson is a dreamer who creates kid forts for grownups (and some for actual kids). I have been a fan of his aesthetic for decades now, but I was first exposed to his tree house installations and mobile experiments through Mollusk Surf Shop in San Francisco. Seeing that shop was like a dream come true for me—everything I loved about surfing and its connection to the arts encapsulated in a rootsy reinterpretation of a traditional surf shop. Jay’s architectural imprint helped define the shop’s now-iconic style.

Mollusk opened their second location in Venice Beach, just down the street from where I bought my first home, a dilapidated foreclosure. When I renovated, I took direct inspiration from Jay’s imaginative body of work and focus on reclaimed wood. A few years later, as I began documenting creative surfers’ homes for my Surf Shacks book series, Jay’s projects became the inspirational North Star—it became like a scavenger hunt to find his projects and feature them. I showed his own home, in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood, in Vol.2, and the house he designed and built for Jess Bianchi and Malia Grace Mau on Kauai, featured in Vol.1, is still one of my favorites that I’ve covered over the years.

Now 1o years later, that same project inspired this house on Molokai, designed and built for Hawaii local, waterman, and rancher Galen McCleary. It’s important to note that Jay doesn’t just design these homes. He builds them with his own hand-picked team of friends and curates all the materials, with every detail considered. Each of his case studies is special in that way—they feel like livable works of art. A lot of love goes into them, and it shows.

These interviews have been excerpted from Surf Shacks Vol. 3: Exploring the Spirit of Coastal Living by Matt Titone, published by Gestalten.

Matt Titone: How did this particular project come about for you?

Jay Nelson: My client, Galen and I first crossed paths at a restaurant by my house. He had seen the house I made in Kauai and asked if I would be interested in doing something similar for him, also in Hawaii. I was feeling a little unsure about taking on a big project far from home and family. But Galen invited me out, and when I saw the site and experienced the place, I felt like it was something I had to do. I knew it had the potential to be one of the great projects of my lifetime. In the end, it worked out pretty good because when the plans were approved, my kids were out of school during Covid, so we all went out there and built the majority of the house during that time.

Describe your design process for the home. Where did you draw inspiration from?

Well, I thought a lot about the place. I made a few trips before I started drawing. Where the house sits is a very special site. There are no other homes in the sight line, so I wanted to make something that blended as much as possible. It’s a big responsibility placing a home in a landscape but the location felt even heavier than normal, so I needed to get it right. The Big Sur architecture of the midcentury is a big inspiration, Northern California in general actually. I buy tons of books even if I’m just remotely interested in the subject. I pull a lot of inspiration from my books.

Were you staying on-site the whole time? What were some of the challenges during the build process?

It was a very challenging place to build. For the whole project, we were off-grid, and the closest hardware store is an hour away. The cement truck couldn’t cross the bridge, so the foundation had to be hand mixed, one shovel at a time. There were five primary builders on the project. Jerry Stauber was on-site almost every day and lives on the island full-time. Max Shultz and Sam Buchanan, who worked for me in California, they also had to make the commute back and forth. And then Galen, who ended up helping a lot. Plus lots of other friends who came for short stints. We were constantly traveling back and forth.