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Off the coast of Tofino, two artists spent nearly three decades building a homestead that floats.
In 1991, Wayne Adams and Catherine King started gathering storm-blown lumber that had washed up on the shores near Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. What began as a small float shelter grew, plank by plank, into Freedom Cove — a fully off-grid compound of connected wooden platforms that the couple has called home since they moved in permanently in 1992. Nearly 30 years later, it still floats, still grows food, and still functions as both a working homestead and an evolving art installation.
- Wayne Adams and Catherine King began salvaging storm-blown lumber near Tofino, BC, in 1991 and moved into Freedom Cove permanently in 1992.
- The homestead is built from 12 connected wooden platforms constructed from over 240,000 pieces of recycled and beachcombed materials, floating on polystyrene covered with fish-farm plastic.
- The couple sustains the property through fishing, four greenhouses growing kale, squash, leeks, cucumbers and medicinal herbs, plus solar panels, backup generators and firewood heat.
From Storm Wreckage to a Floating Address
Freedom Cove sits roughly a 45-minute boat ride from Tofino, tucked into waters chosen specifically for their shelter from Pacific storms. Adams and King anchored their growing structure with heavy lines tied to shore, a system built so that when severe weather rolls through, the entire 12-platform compound sways together rather than tearing apart. That detail alone tells you how deliberately this was engineered — not as a novelty, but as a structure meant to survive decades of west-coast winters.
The location wasn’t random. The couple picked the cove because a freshwater stream sits above sea level nearby, letting them run gravity-fed water straight into the homestead without pumps, supplemented by rainwater catchment. It’s the same kind of site logic you’d see in any serious off-grid build, similar in spirit to the self-built floating homes documented in Spectacular FLOATING HOME is Self-Built & Off-Grid.
An Art Installation You Can Live In
According to the Tofino Arts Council, Freedom Cove is built from more than 240,000 pieces of recycled and beachcombed material — a number that reflects just how much of the compound was assembled from what the ocean and nearby fish farms discarded rather than what the couple bought new. The result is painted in magenta, fuchsia and turquoise across a main living space, an art gallery, a lighthouse, four greenhouses, a dance and yoga studio, and an outdoor dance floor painted with a lotus motif.
Twelve platforms, tied to shore, built from over 240,000 salvaged pieces — and when the storms hit, the whole thing sways together instead of breaking apart.
Adams and King are both artists and carvers, and the gallery on-site displays their sculptures alongside the rest of the compound’s visual identity. It’s less a house with decorations and more a single continuous artwork that happens to include a kitchen and a bedroom.
Growing and Fishing to Stay Fed
King runs the food side of the operation, cultivating kale, squash, leeks, cucumbers and medicinal herbs across both indoor and outdoor beds spread over the four greenhouses. Fishing directly off the platforms fills in the rest of the protein, meaning very little of what the couple eats travels in by boat. That kind of closed-loop growing setup echoes the container and greenhouse gardening covered in How to Grow Raspberries, Blueberries, and Blackberries in Containers, just scaled up to feed a family for 27 years running.
Power comes from a solar photovoltaic array that runs the lighting and greenhouse systems, backed up by generators and firewood heat when the coastal weather doesn’t cooperate. There’s no grid connection to fall back on out there — every watt and every gallon of water is accounted for on-site.
Raising a Family and Making a Living on the Water
Adams and King raised two children on Freedom Cove, funding the lifestyle by selling carved sculptures, natural beeswax candles, and surplus produce from the greenhouses. They also open the property to visitors for guided tours, turning what started as a storm-salvage shelter into a working small business as much as a home.
Nearly three decades in, the math still holds: a 45-minute boat ride from Tofino gets you to a place built almost entirely from other people’s discarded lumber and fish-farm floats, still lit by solar panels, still fed by a gravity-line stream, and still selling carvings and candles to the people who make the trip out to see it.
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