Creative Coops for the Best in Nesting
San Francisco Chronicle
05 May 2013
Ph: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

Matthew Wolpe, Fabrication Shop technician at CED, and his business partner Kevin McElroy at Just Fine Design/Build are co-authors of Reinventing the Chicken Coop, as well as leaders in the field of custom chicken coop architecture. Reinventing the Chicken Coop is a comprehensive guide to high-minded coop construction. With step-by-step instructions, schematics graded for every skill level and photos ready for the pages of Architectural Digest, this is a book that elevates the henhouse from its meager agrarian origins and, as McElroy jokes, "brings the coop from the backyard to the front yard."

By their own admission, Wolpe, 30 and McElroy, 34, would not seem the most likely guys to reinvent the chicken coop. Neither farmers nor architects, the two didn't even get their own birds until after they started building coops together in late 2009. Wolpe and McElroy were looking to diversify their portfolio beyond chairs and coffee tables and to show off the full scope of what they were capable of as craftsmen. In May 2010, they brought their Chick-in-a-Box to the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo. With its cabinet-style nesting boxes, its inverted "butterfly" roof that feeds rain water into a water catchment system, and its front door that folds down as a plank for aviary entry and egress, this was not your grandmother's chicken coop. The judges were impressed. Chick-in-a-Box took home a blue ribbon.

Sadly, the critical acclaim notwithstanding, this did not lead to the explosion in orders for custom coops that the two had hoped for.

"I guess not too many people want to shell out two or three thousand dollars for a custom-made chicken coop," says McElroy, laughing.

But just as they were about to head back to coffee tables and bookshelves, they got an e-mail from Storey Publishing. The proposition: If it's so hard to sell custom coops, in the spirit of Maker Faire, why not teach people to build their own?

With 11 coops to design - plus three more to commission from guest coop designers (yes, there are others) - and only one year to do it all, much of the designing took place on the fly. Out of necessity, trial and error was the predominant approach, which left a lot of room for experimentation.
Coop guidelines

In the book's first chapter, the two established simple guidelines for building a proper coop: It should be safe and comfortable for the chicken, conducive to egg laying and easy to clean "Once you have those down, a coop can be pretty much anything you want it to be," says Wolpe.

In McElroy and Wolpe's case, "anything" came to include a coop shaped like an icebox, a coop-turned-staircase and a coop made out of shipping pallets. The latter, the Pallet Coop, was eventually given to Oakland's urban farming celebrity Novella Carpenter ("she's scrappy and resourceful, so we built her a scrappy and resourceful chicken coop," says McElroy).

With the book finished, the two have left custom coop design behind - at least for now. McElroy is just finishing up his first year at the product design program at Stanford. Wolpe is teaching part time at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. He says he's moved on in his creative vision to tiny houses.

"From coops, it's a pretty logical progression," he says.