There are birdhouses and then there are bird mansions.
When it has windows, a front porch, flowers, a mailbox and gutters – now that’s a mansion. Actually, it’s just a Bowen Birdhouse and it’s really an astounding work of art painstakingly hand-crafted.
Mike Bowen is an amiable, guy-next-door kind of man. He’s easy to talk to, has a wicked sense of humor and definitely is loving life at the moment. His smile is amazingly contagious and the buzz of a workshop is never far away in the background. He’s a busy guy and that’s just the way he likes it.
For the past 17 years, Bowen has called Los Angeles his home. That’s a world away from the Ohio town where he was born and raised thirty-seven years ago before the urge to conquer the entertainment capital took hold of him.
“I decided I wanted to head west,” he told me in a telephone interview. “I just loaded my U-Haul…I had no job, no apartment and no prospects.”
None of that mattered as he set out to live the American dream and – at twenty – he had the luxury of being able to take risks. He did more then face the challenges, he mastered them.
“I had an apartment the first day I was here,” he said. Things just started to click for the young Midwesterner who was as amazed with the big city as he was working around some of the most popular television celebrities of the time.
It wasn’t long before he began appearing as an extra on popular television shows such as FRIENDS, Party of Five and even 3rd Rock. Passing his time of the show sets afforded him an opportunity to mingle with crew members and establish contacts that ultimately helped him break into the business behind the camera building the sets.
It wasn’t just television that drew his interest and after a short time he was doing more then just working as an extra. He was involved in designing and constructing sets for the production crew.
“I worked on Red Shoe Diaries, plus a lot of low budget set design projects as well,” he said.
A set designer is basically a blend of artist and construction worker – a perfect match for an eager kid from Lakewood, Ohio with no formal education in film.
“I went to the school of hard knocks,” he said with a note of pride. “The sooner I got (to LA), the sooner I’d meet the right connections.”
That’s exactly what happened.
His first connections rewarded him with projects for television shows like Access Hollywood and Extra. Ultimately, there was so much work that he formed a business and began working in set design and construction full time.
“If they were looking for someone to build a site,” he said. “I was their guy.”
Those sites weren’t just an ordinary television sets most people think about, nor are they are easy to construct as one may imagine. In Hollywood, everything is done big, but only big enough for the camera to see. These were lavish Hollywood backstage sets – the places where celebrities go to talk to the press after leaving the stage during an award show.
“The first one we did was the Golden Globes,” Bowen said.
Yes, I said the Golden Globes! Not bad for a kid from Ohio.
For the next four years, Bowen continued to work with Extra, while doing projects for the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards, the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards and others.
“Each of those sets was a lot of work, because the space is different for each show,” Bowen said.
Building large theatrical sets and smaller television sets gave him valuable experience in design and construction methods- two talents he puts to use every single day.
When the economy soured and the Great Recession grabbed hold of Hollywood, studios began to trim budgets and eventually eliminated these specialty sets. Bowen said his contracts began to dry up and needed another source of income.
“I was a victim of that as well,” he said. “The industry fizzled and so did our company.”
Rather then fly out of town with the birds, Bowen decided to build houses for them. Yes, build houses for the birds. At first thought, it might seem like a wild career change, but not when you get to know the kind of birdhouses he makes.
“I had been out of work…and a friend wanted a birdhouse made,” he recalled.
His friend gave him a photograph of the house she wanted and they talked a little bit about how it should look. Sounded easy enough to him at the time, but the problem was he had no experience building a birdhouse, especially one that was supposed to look exactly like a family home.
“I’d never done this before,” he said. “But I figured I’d give it a shot.”
Working from that single photograph, Bowen was able to sketch the design on a piece of plywood and then construction began in the workshop behind his Los Angeles area home.
The finished product amazed his friend.
“She told me ‘well no bird is getting in this house’,” Bowen said. That birdhouse is now a focal point in his friend’s home. And, just as she promised, it has never been hung out in the weather.
Word of mouth took over from there and orders started coming in for more birdhouses – each in a different and unique design. Each a little project in and of itself to draw his creative energy, challenge his talents and energize the artist within.
Bowen launched a web site and began selling birdhouses for about $99 each – an extremely fair price considering all the work involved in making one. While there are some stock birdhouses, most are custom designs.
“I realized quickly that people were sending me their memories,” he said. “I had to increase the price because the amount of time I put into each house is astronomical.”
Before he begins any new project, Bowen will spend time staring at the photographs and noticing all the little integrate details about the house. His goal is to include as many of them in the finished product as is humanly possible. Houses can have lighting fixtures, porch swings, flower boxes and grass in the front yard. And – in the case of his fitness-loving friend – he included a miniature set of bar bells on the front porch.
Currently, Bowen needs a six- to eight-week lead time to finish a project and orders continue to stack up, especially as the holiday season approaches.
“I do work on several at a time,” he said. “And each one is still handmade by me.”
It’s a full time job and one that he’s doing the old-fashioned way too. No computer aided design software. No computers at all for that matter.
“It’s almost intuitive,” he said of the process.
Bowen just finished a special birdhouse for a lady who lost her family home when Hurricane Katrina destroyed southern Louisiana.
“It means a lot to me to re-create something that is gone…something with so much emotion and love,” he said.
It obviously does.
There were two dogs in the photograph he was given, obviously important to the customer or they would not have been in the photo.
“Those dogs died in the hurricane,” Bowen said.
When he was finished, there were two small dogs positioned just as they were in the photograph – a special touch from an emotionally-attached artist to someone who lost so much in such a horrific disaster.
Special touches like that create memories, Bowen said. They also define the character of the artist who remembers to include them.
“They are functional,” Bowen said of his birdhouses. “The door even swings out the back to clean out old nests.”
They may be functional, but Bowen does not know of anyone who actually puts them outside to be used by birds. “Maybe some of the stock ones are used that way,” he said. “Most are displayed as (works of) art.” As they should be.
His birdhouses have caught the attention of people all over the country, and a few celebrities right there in Los Angeles too.
Television actor/Extra TV host Mario Lopez is a proud owner of a Mike Bowen original creation, which is displayed in his Los Angeles home as well. And, country music legend Dolly Parton actually owns two of them.
Bowen was involved in the filming of Hollywood to Dollywood, a documentary written by brothers Gary Lane and Larry Lane, about a cross country trek from…well….Hollywood to Dollywood…to meet Dolly Parton. The film’s co-producer/writer Gary Lane, suggested that Bowen do a special birdhouse for the project.
“It was Gary’s idea to do a gift for Dolly in the event we saw her (at Dollywood),” Bowen said.
With a little research, Bowen found a photo of the log cabin that she was raised in and construction was underway.
He created a second birdhouse – this time a bird mansion – for Dolly in the image of her Brentwood, Tenn. mansion. Complete with windows, front porch pillars and shrubs, this project truly was a massive undertaking and incredibly authentic to the finest details.
Hollywood to Dollywood, currently being shown at film festivals all over the country, also marks Bowen’s return to the screen – although this time in a completely different role.
Bowen stays busy, that’s for sure. In addition to appearing with the film at festivals around the country and an upcoming trip to Scotland, he continues to build custom birdhouse creations full time. Over 300 individually designed birdhouses now are on display in homes around the country – many on the east coast where birdhouses remain incredibly popular.
He’s not one to sit back at all. Bowen recently started a specially-commissioned project for the Nixon Presidential Library in Loma Linda, Calif. Fifty of his birdhouses will be made for the gift shop and another specially-designed creation will be available for pre-paid special order there as well. Those will be handmade and shipped to the buyer upon completion.
“I try to keep things as interesting as possible,” Bowen said at the end of our interview.
No doubt about that at all. And I have no doubt that his talent and ambition will continue to drive him to amazing places he never dreamed about when packed that U-Haul so many years ago.
For more information, visit www.bowenbirdhouses.com.