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Half a century ago, Charles Bello walked away from urban modernism and built an entire off-grid world beneath the redwood canopy — and he’s still there.
In 1968, architect Charles Bello and his wife, Vanna Rae, spent their savings on a stretch of heavily logged redwood forest between Willits and Fort Bragg in Mendocino County, California. The land sat a half-hour drive down a dirt road, with no structures, no power, and no water system — just raw acreage the couple would spend the rest of their lives shaping by hand. Fifty-plus years later, Bello is still there, still building, and now looking for someone to carry it forward.
- The Bellos’ first shelter was a panelized A-frame raised in five days for roughly $2,800, where they homeschooled their two sons off the grid.
- In 1991, Bello designed and built the Parabolic Glass House for $8,500, using on-site milled timber, salvaged hardware, and curved glass walls inspired by engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.
- Following Vanna Rae’s death roughly fifteen years ago, the now-octogenarian Bello continues managing the property alone while seeking younger couples to take over as caretakers.
Starting From Bare Ground
Bello, who had interned in the 1950s under modernist architect Richard Neutra, brought formal design training to a project with almost no infrastructure to speak of. He and Vanna Rae engineered their own roads and bridges and set up gravity-fed water systems from scratch, going without a phone line or refrigeration for years before eventually stringing in cabling and installing photovoltaic panels. To keep the land itself, they farmed and sold Christmas trees — the cash crop that financed a homestead with no mortgage and no utility bills.
Their first real structure, the panelized A-frame put up in five days for about $2,800, held the family for fifteen years. It’s the kind of build that a lot of the off-grid woodworking and log-cabin builders chasing similar independence today would recognize immediately — fast, cheap, and entirely self-directed.
The Parabolic Glass House
After the A-frame years and a follow-up cabin that eventually got swallowed by tree growth, Bello designed his signature structure in 1991: the Parabolic Glass House. He built it for $8,500 using timber milled on-site and salvaged hardware for everything down to doorknobs and stoves, wrapping the frame in sweeping curved glass walls that arch beneath the canopy. The undulating form was drawn directly from the surrounding forest and from the structural curves of Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi.
An $8,500 house, milled from the same trees it now sits beneath.
Living Entirely Off the Land
The compound runs on photovoltaic solar, solar thermal, and gas, with an attached greenhouse, garden plots, and orchards supplying nearly all the couple’s food — the same self-reliant approach that shows up across small-scale permaculture setups built around growing what you eat rather than trucking it in. Canning and preserving let the Bellos go months at a stretch without a grocery run, a discipline that carried through raising and homeschooling their two sons on the property.
Beyond building shelter, Bello has spent decades hand-carving redwood root sculptures and, with Vanna Rae, founded the Redwood Forest Institute to restore the clear-cut timberland surrounding their homestead — land nearly stripped of old growth by early 20th-century logging before they arrived.
Finding Someone to Take Over
Vanna Rae died roughly fifteen years ago, and Bello, now in his eighties, has kept managing the property on his own since. His focus now is succession — finding younger couples and community members willing to move in and keep the self-sustaining sanctuary running rather than letting five decades of hand-built infrastructure fall into disrepair.
Nobody’s named a successor yet. Until they do, it’s still just Bello out there, alone on land he and Vanna Rae carved a road into fifty-two years ago, milling redwood for a house that curves like the trees around it.
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