Charles Stag walked into the woods and decided to build something. Now, four years after his death, his daughter and grandson are trying to preserve his masterpiece.
Charles Stagg walked into the woods and decided to build something. There was a spot he liked in the pine forest about a quarter mile behind his parents’ house in the small Beaumont suburb of Vidor. Stagg chopped down the trees to make a field, then pulled bricks out of a landfill and hauled them out there, blazing a trail through shrubs and weeds along the way. Soon he was spending all day in the newly cleared patch, mixing concrete and laying the bricks. He only stopped when his mother came out to bring him meals.
A cluster of concrete buildings slowly rose up on the site, and Stagg began living in them full-time. The entryway was a room he called “The Church of the Swirl,” a concrete foyer topped-off with a narrow, swirling chimney that looked at home in between the pines. Beyond that was a small courtyard and then the centerpiece, a circular studio capped by a twenty-four-foot high hexagonal dome. There was a fireplace inside the studio along with a concrete chair and table that rose out of the floor. In almost all of these rooms—foyer and studio, but also bedroom, storage space, doghouse, even sauna—Stagg embedded glass bottles in the walls. When sunlight filtered through the trees and caught the glass, it produced gorgeous patterns of green, red, blue, and brown, but they were also functional. “The bottles collect warm air from the daylight and retain it through the night,” Stagg told Metropolitan Beaumont in 2004. “It is a little too hot in the summer but it is pretty comfortable to sleep here in the winter. I intend to have my ashes here one day.”But why did he do all of this? Because Stagg, perhaps, knew something that most wouldn’t understand until years later—his home would become his masterpiece, one that wouldn’t be finished when he died in 2012.
A cluster of concrete buildings slowly rose up on the site, and Stagg began living in them full-time. The entryway was a room he called “The Church of the Swirl,” a concrete foyer topped-off with a narrow, swirling chimney that looked at home in between the pines. Beyond that was a small courtyard and then the centerpiece, a circular studio capped by a twenty-four-foot high hexagonal dome. There was a fireplace inside the studio along with a concrete chair and table that rose out of the floor. In almost all of these rooms—foyer and studio, but also bedroom, storage space, doghouse, even sauna—Stagg embedded glass bottles in the walls. When sunlight filtered through the trees and caught the glass, it produced gorgeous patterns of green, red, blue, and brown, but they were also functional. “The bottles collect warm air from the daylight and retain it through the night,” Stagg told Metropolitan Beaumont in 2004. “It is a little too hot in the summer but it is pretty comfortable to sleep here in the winter. I intend to have my ashes here one day.”But why did he do all of this? Because Stagg, perhaps, knew something that most wouldn’t understand until years later—his home would become his masterpiece, one that wouldn’t be finished when he died in 2012.
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