This Man Lives Alone on a Dreamy Ranch with Redwoods

An A-frame house was the first structure Charles and Vanna Rae built, in the summer of 1968. Charles’s parents, his brother, Vanna Rae’s sister, and her husband all lent a hand. It took them five and a half days to construct it on a $2,800 budget. The rooms attached to the left side of the house were a later addition. In the summer, grapevines over the large windows provide shade and temperature control.

Charles and Vanna Rae moved onto the property in May of 1968. Vanna Rae gave birth to their first son, Mark, in August. Their second son, Mike, was born two years later. They bought a neighboring 150 acres in 1978 for $30,000, and the family lived in the A-frame until 1982, raising goats and chickens, growing fruits and vegetables, and running a Christmas tree farm to generate income.

“What’s really interesting about our example here, what we represent, is what two people can do over time. We came on bare land—no roads, no bridges, no water—I mean just a bare piece of land with nothing! It took us 19 years to pay off the [loan from my parents by selling] Christmas trees, and here it is 50 years later, and we have four houses and all kinds of stuff.”

The Grove House was the second house Charles and Vanna Rae built on their property, in 1982.

Charles and Vanna Rae designed and built their second house about 300 feet from their original A-frame. They lived in this house for another ten years, until the trees grew tall enough to block their views of the sky.

Charles began building spec homes in high school in the 1940s. Over his junior- and senior-year summer vacations, he constructed three houses and a small office building in downtown Healdsburg, California. After serving in the Korean War as a cartographer, he worked as a civil engineer in Berkeley and then apprenticed under architect Richard Neutra in Los Angeles. But Charles’s impulses pulled him away from steady employment. For him, sitting “at a desk all day on a drawing board just wasn’t my cup of tea. I never was comfortable. I wanted to go back to nature, farming, and gardening.”

He married Vanna Rae Dove in 1965, and they spent time in New Zealand, where Charles built another spec house. By 1968, the concept of creating their own homestead apart from mainstream civilization crystallized, and after months of searching, they bought the land that would become Bello Ranch.

An exterior view of the Glass House

The Glass House is the third and most dramatic residence that Charles and Vanna Rae built. It’s one of 19 structures that now stand on the property. Solar panels provide electricity, and a dug-in greenhouse below the living area shelters potatoes, lettuces, herbs, tomatoes, and other foods.

Construction began in 1991 and was completed in 1992, as Charles and Vanna Rae continued to farm and manage the property. They built the house with timber milled on-site and mostly salvaged materials. The home’s unique parabolic roof was designed to compliment the ridgeline views outside the massive windows. Charles had previously experimented with this type of roof on some of his spec homes, most notably on a 1965 house in Santa Rosa, California, with five parabolas, still standing at 1610 Manzanita Avenue. 

“I can’t believe, as I look back, how we were able to do these things. It just seems unrealistic, and yet they’re here, so it got done,” he says.

The view from the living-room couch inside the Glass House

Charles’s principles of living in harmony with nature are fully expressed in the Glass House. Everything was designed with the surrounding environment in mind. Even the furniture has been constructed and placed in concert with the surroundings.

“I wanted to see the sky, so I came up here one day, and I sat on a box, and I looked up, and there’s a line that I scribed in my mind’s eye, and within 20 seconds, I had the whole house designed. This was to be a living sculpture—it’s a piece of sculpture we live in—and so every decision made in this house was not convenience or comfort, it was all to create the atmosphere of an artistic expression. Ninety percent of what makes this house is not the house itself but what you’re seeing outside, so it gives you a place to enjoy nature in a very intimate and very close way.”

Charles holds a young branch torn from a B-100 Douglas fir clone that he developed on his Christmas tree farm. With guidance from famed forest geneticist Bill Libby, he successfully cultivated what he calls a “superior” Christmas tree.

“One out of 20,000 Douglas trees turned out far superior as a Christmas tree than all the others. The needles were twice as dense, the color a dark blue-green, the underside of the needles is silver, the branches grow out of the trunk at a more vertical angle, thus able to hold the weight of more ornaments without sagging,” says Charles, who recalls growing about a thousand of these B-100 Christmas trees over the years. “They were a real hit with the public.”

Charles’s mill, where he produces all of the lumber for the buildings on his property. The original mill he built was powered by the rear axle of a 1965 Ford Galaxy. 

“The original intent was to build everything temporary. I never thought we’d get into permanent things. And all these temporary buildings were meant to be the first phase, and that was what we were to accomplish in our lifetime,” says Charles. “Well, the children left, and we went and built a shop, a permanent building there, and we built this house here, and we just keep going. There’s no end to it! I’ve got glamping sites now that I’m working on, and, I don’t know, I’m going to need help to finish those now, because my body just won’t function. And I keep pushing it and pushing it, but I’m coming to the end of being able to do this.”

Charles sands a redwood ring before applying varnish.

Today Charles divides his days between constructing small guesthouses around the property, taking on the occasional furniture commission, and trying to secure the legacy of Bello Ranch. Vanna Rae died on October 10, 2010.

“The question is, what’s going to happen in the future?” says Charles. “Now we’ve been here 52 years, we put a lifetime, the best years of our lives we spent with the idea of doing something beneficial for future generations, and, you know, was it worth the effort? Can it continue?”

Charles’s gallery holds his wood sculptures and is built of locally milled redwood and salvaged glass.

The land Charles and Vanna Rae bought in 1965 had been extensively logged. Through his nonprofit, the Redwood Forest Institute, Charles has designated specific redwood trees that will someday again be considered old-growth.

“I’ve selected 1,000 trees that can never be cut for 2,000 years,” he says. “So let’s not just look short-term, let’s look at what’s gonna happen in the long run.”

Charles walks along the lawn in front of the Glass House to collect laundry drying on a line.

Finding qualified help to live and work on the property has been a huge challenge. And Charles’s nonprofit has struggled to maintain board membership. “The board needs to take over, and I’m trying to get them to meet these people who want to become a part of this and trying to get them to make the decision of whether they’re the right ones or not,” he says. “I’ve tried 15 or 20 people, and none of them have worked out.”

Children’s books sit on a shelf upstairs in the original A-frame left behind by former tenant-caretakers.

I ask Charles about his sons—why wouldn’t they want to continue what he has started?

“When the kids left here, they went at 15 years old,” he says. “They left home, and they went into mainstream and got jobs, so they were really not interested in this lifestyle. In this self-sustaining lifestyle, 90 percent of it is grunt work, it’s a hoe and out in the garden, and I love it! But to a young person in their teens and whatnot, they want to see the world, and they want to be a part of that, what’s out there, so it really wasn’t that appealing. And so they got into their own thing, and they are quite happy right where they are.”

Charles moves large panes of glass that he purchased for five dollars apiece. They’ll become windows in one of the new guesthouses he is building.

“Man has become dominant. What he’s doing is taking away the natural forces that really are the controlling forces of the world,” says Charles. “So man is kind of taking it into his hands to be better than the creation and the natural forces, and when man takes on that position, he’s taking on responsibility for future generations.”

Exhumed roots create a natural gateway to a path leading to the North Fork of the Noyo River that runs through Bello Ranch.

“I think inevitably man is gonna do himself in,” says Charles. “We’re heading that way. To me there’s no question about it. We are in a self-destructive period right now, and I think we’ve reached a peak of where we’re going as far as quality of life. I think the quality of life in the next 30 years, 20 years, it’s not going to be what we have now.”

Charles has watched the river’s once thriving salmon population dwindle to near zero over the decades he has lived here. 

I remarked that humans seem to have jumped free of the natural balance that governs life on earth. Charles pointed out our ability to squelch disease. What once would have eliminated huge swaths of population is now inoculated against. I asked him about the COVID-19 outbreak, which had only just begun to be seriously acknowledged in the U.S. at the time of the interview.

“What’s happening today is, we have this virus thing, and basically, people think I’m crazy, I know, but I think [viruses] are beneficial,” he says. “With medication and disease control, man has made it so that the gene pool is deteriorating.”

In his view, our ability to overcome disease and other existential threats has allowed us to dominate all life on earth and, in turn, grow in an uncontrolled manner, while simultaneously bucking natural selection among our own species, putting us in a brittle situation.

“The control now is no longer control to get bigger and wealthier,” he says. “The control now is to keep yourself in consistency with the natural forces. Where I see the future is with isolated groups all over the world, and they are self-sustaining, and they understand they have to minimize their growth.”

Charles takes a call sitting in the one-room house he lives in now, situated behind the Glass House.

“We never took a day off. I would wake up in the dark, chomping at the bit, just waiting to get out,” says Charles. “I’ve got a project, I’m so anxious to get to it, I’m waiting for it to get light. Then I’d put in 16 to 18 hours, like five miles of road building with a backhoe up on mountains that were 30 to 40 percent grade. I enjoyed it. It was so much fun.”

The world that Charles and Vanna Rae built for themselves at Bello Ranch seems impossible to create in the present day. The land alone would be prohibitively expensive for all but very few. Charles is aware of that. Again and again, he expressed his wish to pass on his accumulated knowledge and experience.

Charles and the orange four-wheeler he affectionately calls his “little buddy”

“I really hurt not having, right at this moment, a solution for the future of this property,” he says. “That is the most important thing to me, is hoping that I could put together some plan that could carry forward some semblance of what I have done here so that there’s a continuation of this.

“I think everybody’s going to want this, because this is going to become more and more attractive to people, comparing it to what life has in store for them, even five or ten years from now.”

Charles watches the tops of the redwood trees move in an afternoon breeze.

“If I were to have to leave this place and live in even a small town like Willits,” says Charles of the nearest town, which has a population of under 5,000, “I could not hack it. I go to Willits with a shopping list, and I get in there, and I get so frustrated with the traffic, the noise, and I have to be careful because people are rushing me and backing into me with cars. I get halfway through my shopping list and I say, ‘Forget it! I’m going home!’”