Gestalten Surf Schacks: Volume 2

Surf Shacks: Volume 2 by Gestalten continues Matt Titone’s exploration of surfing as both culture and daily practice. Rather than focusing only on the water, this volume turns to the spaces in between, the homes, studios, cabins, and improvised shelters that shape life around the tide. It presents a quieter, more personal view of surfing, centred on how surfers live onshore and how their surroundings reflect their routines, values, and creative habits.

The book moves across a wide range of settings that all fall under the idea of a surf shack. These include city apartments, cabins near national parks, tiny Hawaiian huts, and remote, highly individual homes built around a life connected to the ocean. The result is a broad portrait of surfing communities and the different ways they define home. Creativity and innovation run throughout, not as abstract themes, but as something visible in the places people build, adapt, and inhabit.

Surf Shacks: Volume 2 looks beyond architecture alone. Record collections, backyard gardens, artist studios, and everyday domestic details offer a more complete sense of character. Through these interiors and personal spaces, the book documents surfing culture in a way that feels grounded and specific. It captures the moments away from the swell, where identity is shaped through design, work, collecting, and conversation.

Featured stories include a remote Hawaiian treehouse, the converted bus home of the Goodwin family, and the Japanese mountain cabin of Gentemstick founder Taro Tamai. It also introduces Jamie Smallwood, a sustainable architect who created an off the grid shipping container compound in Byron Bay. Each space carries its own logic and atmosphere, showing how surfers and makers translate freedom, function, and environment into the places they live.

Built through anecdotes, photography, illustrations, and conversations, this second volume reveals a more intimate side of surfing and the people around it. For readers interested in interiors, creative living, and surf culture beyond performance, Surf Shacks: Volume 2 offers a measured and visually driven look at the relationship between place and lifestyle.

• Title, Surf Shacks: Volume 2
• Publisher, Gestalten
• Created by, Matt Titone
• Focus, surfers’ homes, creative habits, and life on and offshore
• Content, anecdotes, photographs, illustrations, and conversations
• Featured settings, city apartments, cabins, Hawaiian huts, treehouses, converted bus homes, and shipping container compounds
• Notable subjects, Taro Tamai, Jamie Smallwood, Goodwin family