Building the Home Where Chickens Come to Roost

in Tennessee Valley is not your average farm.

For one, it’s easily the closest working farm to the Golden Gate Bridge, sitting on about two acres of land on Tennessee Valley Road. And it’s no fledgling operation, having been tended by the Kirkland family for more than 144 years.

Owner Ken Kirkland adds yet another dimension to the mix, constantly innovating and adding to the skills that constitute being a farmer in 2011: raising chickens for eggs and sheep for meat and wool, growing an assortments of fruits and vegetables, manufacturing bio-diesel and building his own chicken coops.

But in recent months, Kirkland has been paring back on the latter of those jobs. His chicken coops are steadily being replaced by those built by Homestead Valley resident Mario Klip, a native of Holland with a resume that is as diverse as it is impressive.

“His are just much nicer,” Kirkland says of Klip’s Holland Hen Houses. “I’m a carpenter by trade, but I’m phasing mine out. Time to upgrade.”

Kirkland’s farm also serves as an outdoor showroom of sorts for Klip’s hen houses, as many of his eventual customers who’ve spotted them on a drive along Tennessee Valley Road can attest.

co-owner Dave Canepa just bought one of Klip’s hen houses, hoping to rekindle his childhood experience of raising chickens and eventually looking to sell a line of “Canepa Farms’ Fresh Local Eggs.”

Canepa says the land around his Scott Valley home is crawling with critters, and Klip’s hen houses are as structurally secure as he’s seen anywhere, in addition to being easy on the eyes.

“I don’t see how any kind of critter could get into them,” Canepa says. “They’re just very well constructed.”

Klip came to the U.S. in 2000 when the company he worked for, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, asked him to transfer to the Bay Area. He stayed with Sun for a decade, eventually growing weary from the grind and quitting in early 2008.

He did consulting for technology companies in Silicon Valley, but ultimately added to his list of occupations out of a need to fill a personal void: He was looking for a coop in which to house his own chickens and simply couldn’t find one he liked.

“Everything here was very utilitarian,” he said. “They were a stinky mess and the house was ugly and it was going to be an eyesore in the garden. When I was growing up, the hen house had a place in the garden.”

Klip started creating designs for hen houses based on what he remembered from Holland, one cheap and utilitarian and one high-end and expensive. He arranged to import a container of sample houses from Holland, and received positive feedback from friends and local residents.

Klip put his business background to good use and did some market research, learning that while the concept of owning your own chickens was taking off in the U.S., the hen house market here was thin with competitors.

Word has spread through his website and word-of-mouth, with Klip working with carpenters who construct most of the homes in Sausalito. He has more than a half dozen types of houses he sells, and he recently added one that is constructed with recycled wood, a request he’s been getting a lot more of lately.

Klip says he sought to fill a void between the $500 utilitarian box with no aesthetic value and the incredibly high-end models that were often constructed as miniature versions of the owner’s home.

“There wasn’t anything in between,” he says.

Klip admits that the hen house business, particularly the way he has pursued it by using high quality materials – he says the cage wire he uses is three times more expensive than traditional hen house wire – isn’t the most lucrative profession.

“I wanted to build a house that would be able to withstand all of the predators we have here in Marin trying to get at your chickens,” he says. “The number one reason people buy more chickens is if they forgot to lock up their hen house.”

Kilp says he sold nearly 60 houses in 2010 and is on pace to exceed that mark in 2011. Approximately 60 percent of his customers live in Marin.

As if business consulting and a burgeoning hen house business weren’t enough, Klip is also pursuing his Master’s degree in wildlife biology at Sonoma State University.

In the span of just a few years, a director-level technology manager has transformed himself into the owner of Holland Hen Houses and an aspiring wildlife biologist.

“I haven’t had a moment’s regret about making this change,” Klip said.