The Chicken Coop King

Ray Cooper is not the first small businessman to struggle to persuade retailers to grant him space for his unique product. An artisan craftsman of full-sized chicken coops made from recycled chicken barns, many of them a hundred years old, each of Cooper's coops requires a floor space equivalent of a California King-sized bed.

In other words, they are big, big coops. Think mini-van. Think tree house. Think, where do you put it?

"No, it wasn't easy at first," says the 52-year-old Cooper. "But then RiverTown gave me a chance and pretty quick we had a day when we sold two."

Cooper is an eco-Renaissance man who has dedicated himself to sustainable practices like keeping egg-laying hens. A soft spoken, yet energetic conversationalist, Cooper is passionate about recycling. He has recently become a vegetarian, lives within his means, hikes instead of driving when he can and is passing on his creative skills to his 22-year-old son and assistant, Kevin Cooper.

He doesn't want to be the Henry Ford of chicken coops, he says. Instead he wants to be a Green Michelangelo, rejecting staples altogether, taking the time to use screws instead of nails, and searching garage sales and thrift stores for vintage painted wood chickens to decorate the front doors.

He is also pack-ratting small stained glass windows that add sparkle, distinguishing these coops as rustic jewel boxes of barnyards.

"The windows can be a challenge because you don't find them small and when you do, you don't find them cheap," said Cooper with a grin.

A former handyman for his family's real estate business and milk truck driver, Cooper hopes to hone his chicken coop model, which maximizes the eaves for nest boxes and has removable wire grid floors, into the eco-Cadillac of coops.

They'll never be cheap, he says. But they'll be worth the cost to people who understand the challenges of lovingly collecting and rehabbing old, thick and wide redwood lumber. Cooper figures if he pays himself and his son $10 to $20 an hour, he'll be happy. That means he'll have to charge up to $1,000 a piece for the one or two coops he can fabricate each month in a small, cramped barn on a hill overlooking the Petaluma Outlets.

"I'm making them all from hundred-year-old, inch thick redwood, which I took down myself. These old barns lasted a hundred years and the coops will last another hundred years," he said.

He's so busy and entrenched in his creative labors, that he's yet to brand his coops. If you ask the folks at RiverTown who makes the coops, they'll write Cooper's name and phone number on your sales slip.

"Everyone is going back to the land and old ways. Chickens have never been more popular. More and more people are discovering them. If I can do work I'm passionate about and receive the fruits of my own labors? That's all I can ask," Cooper says.