Cheep, Cheap (Not!) -- A Pair Of Area Birdhouse Builders Let Fly With Their Artistic Sensibilities

Seven or eight years ago, birds came back from Sun City or wherever it is they fly to when they fly south and discovered their dwellings had become art.

They were shocked.

One birdhouse, designed by an East Coast architect, recently sold for $27,000.

That's a whole lot of bird seed, even with low interest rates.

There are dozens of fine birdhouse makers in this area. Today we tell the tale of two. Rob Snyder of the Green Lake area and Karen Burroughs of Bainbridge Island. Their styles are distinctly different, as are their backgrounds. He was trained in fine art. She was an assembly mechanic at The Boeing Co. But they share the same bottom line: Neither could afford that $27,000 birdhouse.

Birds would be happy with any old nesting box that meets - or even doesn't meet - Audubon Society specifications for each species. But what do those bird brains know?

Rob Snyder

Rob Snyder runs "The Urban Crow" out of a converted carport in the back yard of the house he shares with his wife and two children.

His creations are wildly modern. Bright colors. Impressionistic design. He sells through galleries, catalogs and art fairs for prices that range from $125 to $1,500.

He packages his work with kits that include hardware to make the stripped cedar-tree poles stand erect in yards, houses or galleries.

Snyder considers his work sculpture, but he knows most of the world sees it as building birdhouses. Folk craft. It's a compromise, a way to help keep food on the table without losing complete touch with art.

The upside is that he can control his hours and he doesn't have his ego fully invested in the birdhouses. The downside of production art is the repetition and the dizzying swings from not enough work to too much.

"Weeks ago it looked gloomy, and now I'm thinking, `How am I going to get all of this done?' " said Snyder.

For every Dale Chihuly and his six-figure income, there are thousands of artists like Snyder. Their lives are a balance between trying to keep solvent and trying to steal time to devote to creativity.

Snyder taught for a while at the Bush School and enjoyed it. But he found that all his energy was going into his students' creations and not his own.

He built a few birdhouses when he and his wife, Bridget Culligan, a freelance graphics designer, worked to make their back yard a family sanctuary. Visitors were delighted. After he'd heard "those are so cool" often enough, Snyder tested his creations at the Bellevue Art Fair three years ago.

There he heard the same thing. Some people gave orders for houses and many more said, "Someday I'm going to buy one of those." Snyder began to think of it as more than a lark.

He kept his operation small and tried to perfect each house. Then one day he had what he thought was his big break. The Nature Company wanted to put his houses in its national catalog. Snyder rented a workshop, hired a crew of starving artists and stepped up production.

The birdhouses sold, but somehow trying to keep up quality, pay wages and buy great quantities of material just wasn't cost effective. Snyder found himself getting further from his art and from his family.

He became a manager, a salesman. He toured the country, setting up booths at wholesale and retail craft shows so his work would be seen by galleries that catered to tourists.

"Basically, I wanted to create a job for myself that was interesting, but it became overwhelming."

Now he's back home, working on his own. He's got orders through October plus a series of side jobs that include building equipment for the Pilchuck Glass School and working with a school that's having each class paint a birdhouse for a children's garden.

Snyder still struggles with the difference between art and craft, the spirited horse or the steady mule.

When he works with fine art, he feels it has something to say. But sometimes his confidence gets battered by the message because it's harder to judge what's good.

He broke away from the production art long enough recently to create man and woman figures that also were birdhouses, but more subtle. His usual craft outlets considered them too much like art.

"It was very good for me and my soul," Snyder said. "It seems to be a little bad for the craft."

There's enough that is artistic about his birdhouses that people pay hundreds of dollars for the fancier ones. He cares about them, but not so much that he suffers when people walk by his displays and talk about the birdhouse they bought at Ernst Home Center for $10.

"As soon as it's in the production mode, no way can it be art," said Snyder. "Your soul is not there.

"The birdhouses are interesting objects, but they're never trying to say anything other than what they are."

Karen Burroughs

Karen Burroughs has a marketing problem. She keeps building her birdhouses with marine plywood and heavy-duty exterior paint, but her buyers refuse to put them outside.

"People say they're too beautiful," said Burroughs. "They don't want bird poop on them."

Small detail!

"All you have to do is hose them off."

About two-thirds of her work at Rolling Bay Bird Homes ends up inside, bought by interior designers. One house was featured recently at the upscale Street of Dreams.

Since it's going inside anyway, Burroughs' work is evolving into "adult dollhouses," a rapidly growing market where houses are built to scale and fully furnished. She recently sold a miniature cottage to a well-known California collector.

The charm of her work is the detail. Leaded-glass windows, hand-made hinges, workable shutters, hand-split cedar roofs. The architecture is from medieval England or the Mediterranean or the Northwest.

Some of her ideas are fantasy. Sometimes she takes scraps of wood to her basement workshop and creates as she goes.

But more often she is influenced by the dozens of architecture books she and her husband have collected. (Mike Burroughs is an architectural illustrator.)

Burroughs designs her work on a computer and is no stranger to blueprints. She started her career doing architectural drafting. Later she went to work for The Boeing Co., where her favorite job was building mock-up airplanes.

At Boeing she learned to cut and drill straight lines and to pay attention to exacting measurements. Blueprints and power tools are not unlike using a dress pattern and a sewing machine, she said, although the saws are a worry.

Burroughs has always been mechanically inclined. Her grandfather was a maintenance man for a chain of drugstores and her mother worked beside him and learned to put in light fixtures and other tasks.

Burroughs grew up watching both her parents tackle projects, and she quickly developed an interest in how things work. She used both hands working on airplanes, which she thinks may be why neither side of her brain had a chance to dominate.

"I've never liked jobs where I didn't have a chance to build things," Burroughs said.

Her work career was cut short because she developed fibro myealgia, whose symptoms include muscle pain and chronic fatigue.

"It's been both a blessing and curse," said Burroughs, who must pace herself. "I was in the trap of a well-paying job."

The blessing is that she has time to study her craft. She taught herself woodworking from books and videotapes. She is learning or will learn glass blowing, silversmithing, blacksmithing, how to make copper-foiled stained glass windows and lost wax metal casting - all in miniature.

Lately she's been selling her doll- and birdhouses through her own shop in Port Townsend on weekends. They sell for $60 to $2,000.

This is not the first time birdhouses have become an art form, she said. Victorian houses had elaborate birdhouses in their gardens; a simpler style was revived in the 1940s.

Burroughs believes the birdhouse market may be saturated, but dollhouse sales continue to grow. All of it, she thinks, is a backlash to the rapid change society feels as the century ends.

"There's no such thing as a simple on-and-off button anymore," Burroughs said. "I took a simple cottage to a dollhouse show and people stood around it and dreamed of a quiet life in the woods.

"I kept hearing them say, `I could live in that.' "

----------------------------------- TWO DISPLAYS: CREATIVITY TAKES WING -----------------------------------

There are at least two good displays of exotic birdhouses happening now and soon.

The first ends Sunday, so you'd better hurry if you want to see Seattle artist Patricia Klamser's "habitable" sculptures on display at Sandy Bradley's Potluck Gallery, 619 N. 35th St.

They are part of a show called "The Power and Glory of Aging." The houses are designed to meet the specifications of various species. Call 548-9622 for details. Hours are noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

The second is the Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council's third birdhouse auction, May 5 at 3 p.m. at Hobble & Hays Ltd., at Madison Avenue and Wyatt Way, within walking distance of the ferry.

The preview starts at 2 p.m. Birdhouses will be on display from Thursday at Hobble & Hays until the auction. Phone: 842-5263.