Coop de Hill

Richard’s Coop de Hill sits behind his vegetable garden, near his bee hives.

If you want a chicken coop that sits in one place like Grandma’s did (as opposed to the movable coop in my last post), you might be interested in this picturesque coop built by Chicago’s Mindful Metropolis Publisher Richard McGinnis for the backyard layers at his rural farm Thorny Hill Manor, from which he works or commutes into the city by rail.

Here are the stats from Richard:

The coop is 6’ wide x 8’ deep – the walls are just over 6’, it is 10’ at the peak and it is raised 20” off the ground. It has four levels. The fenced in part under the coop where the hatch and ramp are is also 6’ X 8’ and opens out into a 7’ x 12’ outdoor covered run. The interior of the coop has a main floor that is 6’ x 6’, a common nest box that is about 1’ deep and 6’ long with outside access, two additional hanging nest boxes on the wall, a roost above the common nest box (with an outside door for easy cleaning of the roost pan) and a large storage loft for feed and bedding, etc.

This is the back of the coop. You can see the ramp under the coop that allows the chickens to come and go through a hole in the floor. You can also see several doors in the back of the coop: the bottom one is for gathering eggs from the nest box; the middle ones are for cleaning the roosts; and the top ones open to a storage area.

One of the things I especially love about Richard’s coop is that more than half of the building materials were recycled or repurposed — and it is so cute, which proves that we can be fashionable and green at the same time.

And here are a couple of construction photos to give you a better idea of how it is put together:

Unlike most coops that have chickens coming and going through a door in a wall, this one has the chicken door in the floor!

The yellow door at the front of the house is also a chicken door, but Richard only lets his hens out to run around the yard when he is there to supervise. When he is gone, the chickens can use the door in the floor to go into the run, where they are protected from predators. “I am gone a lot, so they can stay out all day, and when I get home at night, all I do is reach in and close the trap door because they are all roosting already,” explains Richard. “I feel pretty confident the whole set up is reliably predator resistant, but nothing is predator-proof, so I like locking the trap door at night.”

If you would like to discover more about other types of chicken houses check out Building a Chicken House: Design, Construction, and Maintenance.