Twigitecture: Building Human Nests

Drew Kelly for The New York TimesJayson Fann, a nest maker, artist and musician, has built some 30-odd nests. Three are in Big Sur, including a meditation nest at the Post Ranch Inn. More Photos ?

BIG SUR — Last week, I spent a night in a nest. Woven from eucalyptus branches, it bloomed high on the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway, a great whorl of sticks atop four gnarly pillars. The north wind hissed through the gaps in the branches and the fog settled on my face and sleeping bag, but I could see the stars through the nest’s oculus entry and hear the elephant seals miles below honking and braying in a lullaby like no other.

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Designed and built by Jayson Fann for the Treebones “glamping” resort here (mostly yurts with a fantastic view), the nest, which costs $110 a night, is always booked. Mr. Fann, 40, a nest maker, artist, community educator and musician, said the nest is so popular, there have been nest marriages and, inevitably, nest babies. Proud parents send him photos.

From New Age cocoons and backyard playthings of the rich to public installations made from the wood of hurricane-felled trees to contemporary art objects that you can buy along with your Richters and Oldenburgs, human nests are having a bit of a moment.

This spring, a South African nest maker named Porky Hefer, who was formerly a creative director at Ogilvy & Mather and Bozell, took his nests on a tour of the design fairs, from Design Miami/Basel and Collective .1 in Manhattan to Design Days in Dubai, where a stiletto-heeled fairgoer climbed into his leather off-cut nest and stayed for a half-hour. “I think it was because she didn’t quite realize she was wearing a dress,” he said of her long sojourn there.

Chee Pearlman, a design consultant and curator, ventured that nests are “probably the purest antidote to the heavy steel-and-concrete building footprints that, city by mega-city, are overtaking the globe.”

But it is not just the appeal of the handmade object — twig and daub as a rebuke to glass and steel — that makes a nest so desirable. It is the sophisticated design models they are based on. For nests like Mr. Fann’s and Mr. Hefer’s are hardly crude objects. Like the birds’ nests that inspired them (weaver birds, in Mr. Hefer’s case), these human pods are keenly engineered structures made from materials at hand. Design blogs are peppered with enticing examples. Mr. Fann’s nests, for example, are as sturdy as a concrete bunker; eucalyptus, plentiful in Northern California, is not just lovely but doughty, and cures as hard as metal.

“Birds were the original architects,” Ms. Pearlman said, “creating fantastic and extreme examples of blobitecture and parametric design long before any architecture critic labeled these styles. They are also summa cum laude engineers, able to transform cheap, insubstantial building materials into the most durable and cozy of homes. All this without a single CAD rendering, which today’s architecture students are helpless without.”

Prehumans, of course, were born in nests, and we used to be pretty good at making them. Great apes like chimpanzees and bonobos still make complex and lovely ones. The best modern architecture, like the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, succeeds because it offers new models of the nest and its surrounds, what the British geographer Jay Appleton called “prospect and refuge” — cozy nooks and open vistas — that are familiar because of our evolutionary coding.

In 2011, three grown men, a naturalist, an ornithologist and an engineer, built a man-size hummingbird’s nest at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and camped out in it, as part of the Nat Geo Wild television series “Live Like an Animal.” Reached by phone at his home in England recently, James Cooper, the engineer, recalled how they built the nest with bungee cords and bean canes and stuffed it with “duvets and feathers and pillows and lovely soft nest-y stuff.”

He added: “Basically, it was three stupid Englishmen trying to behave like hummingbirds. We drank a lot of nectar, which does strange things to your mood. The interesting thing about trying to live like a bird is that when you’re high up, surrounded by all these zoo animals, you felt you were in the safest, warmest spot. The last thing you wanted was to be down, out of the thing, among the animals.”

But the nest wasn’t big enough for all three men, he said, and he was evicted early on. He spent the rest of the night on a bench, trying to sleep through the roaring of the lions.

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