A Handmade House

Kathleen Whitehurst has spent years making art—including a house from recycled materials

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Artist Kathleen Whitehurst finds material everywhere she looks—she paints, but she also works in recycled glass, stone, wood, and seaglass—pieces of glass washed ashore and smoothed by years of contact with sea and sand.

Perhaps her most amazing creation is the house in Arnaudville that she built from salvaged materials. Located on a small piece of property her father gave her, it was once in the middle of nowhere but is now surrounded by other houses in Hidden Hills, a gated community that overlooks a fifty-five-acre manmade lake.

“I was fourteen when my dad gave me the land,” she said. “I remember riding in the back of a station wagon to look at it. There was no water in the lake; it had just been dug. He drove around and said, ‘This has potential for you to build a camp or a house.’ He gave me a survey map. I was too young to think about it, but once I got out of school I let loose.”

The house, which has about 2,100 square feet, is two stories tall, with a spiral staircase inside and an upstairs deck overlooking the lake. There is a tiny platform designed as a “meditation space” and interesting views from every angle.

Whitehurst likes living “off the grid,” but her water is supplied by a community well and electricity by Entergy. “My average bill is fifty dollars,” she said.

The house is heated by a wood stove downstairs with a pipe connecting it to the upstairs level. There are window units for guests, but Whitehurst says she is happy without AC, just leaving the doors and windows open for cross ventilation. “I have lots of ceiling fans and other fans to keep the air flowing,” she said. “I just basically do it the old-fashioned way. Everything is wide open. I have great exposure to nature. I can see the lake and hear the birds.”

Beneath the raised house are a workshop where Whitehurst repairs furniture she finds on the side of the road; gardening tools; and two small “bungalows” that she stays in when she rents out the two bedrooms through Airbnb. Currently, she sleeps in the smaller bungalow—heated with an oil heater and cooled with a fan—while renting the entire house for a year.

Whitehurst, now sixty-one, is petite, but well-defined muscles in her arms attest to the hard work and heavy lifting she has done for years. “My back is shot,” she confessed, although you’d never guess it as she darts about, her energy seemingly endless.

Born and raised in Lafayette, she was unhappy in school, mainly because she was almost totally deaf from birth and underwent several surgeries. Today she wears hearing aids but communicates easily, even by phone. “I also read lips,” she said.

Whitehurst spent hours planning and stockpiling materials before she began to build her house, which she calls The Sanctuary. “I was about twenty when I started collecting materials,” she said. “My dad got me an old pickup truck, a little baby-blue Datsun, manual drive. It was fun. I’d ask guys on the street corner to help me pick up salvaged materials when I had a lot of hauling to do. I’d give them a six-pack of beer for helping me.”

She deposited the materials on her land, carefully stacking and inventorying everything. Meanwhile, she set about learning what to do with it. “I took cardboard and built a model to scale. I studied passive solar energy and shading, how to orientate different parts of the house to the east, west, north, and south. I drew every window and door and cut ‘em out opposite each other for cross ventilation.

“I read Reader’s Digest books on how to build your own house. I’d go to the library and make photocopies.”

Scouring the countryside, she found doors from an Opelousas courthouse that had burned down and windows from a collapsed Baptist church in New Iberia. She found doors “all over Acadiana—Rayne, New Iberia, Grand Coteau.” The striking ceiling beams, made of longleaf pine, came from a rice mill in Rayne. She found “any and everything” out in the woods. “Demolition companies would just dump it.” The oak flooring, which she installed on the diagonal, came from several structures.

When she was ready to start building, Whitehurst camped out on her property in a tent. She oriented the house to use sun and wind in what she calls a “passive solar structure. The south side overlooks the lake; that wall is eighty percent glass,” she said. “The north side has zero glass. The west side is sixty percent glass and the east side is forty percent glass.”

What she couldn’t find she built herself. An upstairs bedroom has a porthole that measures eighteen inches wide; Whitehurst made it from oak scraps from the flooring. She also installed portholes in the bathroom, the kitchen, and one of the bungalows. If she needed a window in a certain spot, she’d build one.

Whitehurst calls the house a “work in progress” and is still making changes to it, such as adding a terrace last summer “to prevent erosion.” Today she finds help for hauling materials through the Opelousas Lighthouse Mission, a shelter and living facility for men. “I feed them and pay them eight dollars an hour.”

She started building the house at age twenty, and by the mid-1980s she was ready to rent it out. “I took a break from building to travel and study art,” she said. “My mother sent me to Europe. I took art classes in Florence, [Italy]. Then I spent some time on the East Coast of the U.S. I took six or seven painting workshops, backpacking from Maine to Virginia.”

In 1988, back in Lafayette, she opened Café des Artistes in a hundred-year-old vacant building. “I had the first coffee house in town,” she said. “I also made it into a café, an art gallery, and a space for musicians to play.”

After her mother died in 1991, Whitehurst sold the business. By 1993 she was living in Madisonville with her father Joe, her giant schnauzer London, and her Amazon parrot Chico. She continued to make art, searching the Tchefuncte River for driftwood to make into sculpture. Soon she was director of a gallery in Covington.

Around 1995, she and her dad moved to Belize in Central America, where Whitehurst built a thatched-roof hut on Progresso Lagoon. She also dug a buried trimaran boat out of the sand, rebuilt it, and turned it into a floating café.

On a visit home in 1997, Joe Whitehurst died and the family (Whitehurst is the youngest of five) buried him in Lafayette. After settling his affairs, she returned to Belize and continued work on the boat café.

“In 1998, I went to New Orleans to buy café materials, and while I was gone Hurricane Mitch hit Belize,” she said. “I got discouraged and sold the boat to a marine-biology company.”

She spent the next few years traveling in Europe and South America. Around 2003, Whitehurst set up shop in New Orleans, selling her art at Pirate’s Alley. When NUNU Arts and Culture Collective opened in Arnaudville in 2003, she began selling her paintings and jewelry there but continued traveling.

Eventually, she returned to Arnaudville and became more involved in NUNU, which occupies nearly three acres on Bayou Courtableau Highway. With help from such international organizations as Workaway and Help Exchange, Whitehurst found volunteers to help her with her house. “Two couples, one from Germany and one from New York, laid out the terrace during the summer of 2013. It was a lot of work. They helped me pick up the stones, which had been dumped on the banks of Bayou Teche. Then they helped me lay them out in lines to form a terrace.”

In exchange for their labor, Whitehurst housed and fed the volunteers. She has grown close to many of them. “Some are young, and some are older, like me. Most are young backpackers who travel all over the world. They really want to learn about the culture. Over the years, I’ve had about twenty-five people at the house—a bunch from Canada, a few from France, a couple from Barcelona. I cry every time they leave. We keep in touch.”

Whitehurst also introduced the concept of using international volunteers to NUNU. “Before that we were using strictly local volunteers,” said founder George Marks. “Kathleen totally spearheaded that for us.” At the start of 2014, international workers began coming to NUNU. They helped build a cob oven (for baking bread and pizzas) and four small pavilions. They also helped Whitehurst convert a hay barn into a sign-making workshop she calls Studio Artville. Her custom-made wooden signs decorated with mosaic glass are popular with both business and residential buyers. 

In February and March 2015, NUNU, Whitehurst, and Tiny House-builder Art Cormier of Lafayette will hold four weekend workshops, teaching a dozen persons to construct one-hundred-square-foot living spaces on wheels. Whitehurst has been collecting salvaged materials for months to use in the project.

“Kathleen is very work-oriented, very motivated,” said Marks, who started NUNU in 2003. “She’s a trouper.”

Cormier, who travels the country giving workshops on building Tiny Houses, and who himself lives in a one-hundred-square-foot house in Lafayette, is stoked about bringing the first such workshop to Louisiana. “Kathleen’s creativity is amazing,” he said. “I’m excited to be partnering with her.”

Though she will teach people to build small houses, Whitehurst still has her handmade house, which Marks describes as “like an oversize tree house.” Change has been a constant in Whitehurst’s life, but she admits a desire to slow down and perhaps downsize. “Now I’m shifting. I want to narrow down my lifestyle, maybe rent out the house and live in a camper.”

Wherever she ends up, it will probably be in a structure made with her own two hands. “The whole construction thing is because I zeroed in to my creative side,” she said. “I just collected materials and figured out what to do with them. I built it out of inspiration.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.