My name is Pete Robey and my wife Blythe and I live in Tasmania. The little island attached to the bottom of Australia. Thought I would share with you that our house is the first approved cordwood home in Australia. It is currently featured in Australia’s Owner Builder magazine. You can get a link here at the bottom of the page: www.thehousethatworkedout.com
I bought your 3 books: Shelter, Builders of the Pacific Coast, and Home Work early on before we had even confirmed style. The Baird House from page 28–31 of Builders of the Pacific Coast just grabbed me. Thanks Mike Baird and to you too Lloyd (House) for this inspiration. We designed our home with the same ideal: every room and every area of the home can pretty much engage with every other area of the home. The village TeePee idea. We have a massive 4 ft. diameter, 2 ft. long tree holding up the earth roof and our 2nd story doesn’t go all the way to the middle so we have plenty of space. We don’t have stairs, preferring to use a gym rope as exercise — see this post from our blog: www.thehousethatworkedout.com/…
This is my friend Travis in Olympia. He made this trailer for $7,000. He lives in it full time so he can move it when he wants. He is an excellent wood carver as well as a metalworker.
Our French carpenter friends Yogan and Menthé spent several months last summer, hitchhiking up and down the Northwest Pacific Coast and trading their carpentry skill for room and board.
When they left, they visited us here and we downloaded about 1,000 of their photos. They’d had a great trip.
They wrote: “The U.S.A. is incredible, so much imagination. It was a perfect trip for me. Thank you Lloyd, I wanted to meet the amazing builders of the pacific coast. Your book Builders of the Pacific Coast was my motivation for my trip to the West Coast.”
I picked out a few photos and Yogan has written these captions. We’ll post them one at a time.
The Leviathan Studio on Lasqueti Island. Mark is a contemporary dancer who built this studio by himself. He used trees from his 12½-acre property. The south side was made with used windows; the floor is yellow cedar. The roof is green: he used EPDM roofing. It’s built it for dance workshops during the warm season. The architecture is inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci.
Since discovering straw bale construction in 1992, Catherine Wanek has traveled widely to spread the straw bale gospel, and documenting traditional and modern examples of natural building. She co-edited The Art of Natural Building in 2002, wrote and photographed The New Strawbale Home in 2003, and wrote The Hybrid House in 2010. Her photos are featured in Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter.
Shown above, Thierry Dronet built this fairy-tale hybrid of straw bales and cordwood masonry, topped with a “living roof,” as his workshop and stable for two horses in eastern France. Bale walls act to retain the hillside, with a plastic sheet barrier and a “French drain” to wick away moisture. Time will tell whether this practice is advised. Read More …
Just thought you might like to see some photos of SunRay’s latest creation — a funky little treehouse nestled in ponderosa pine trees, built during the recent 20th anniversary Natural Building Colloquium in Kingston, New Mexico. I have a bunch of images on my website here: www.theyearofmud.com/blog
It’s a beautiful structure, particularly the roof. Hope you enjoy!
–Ziggy
Brian “Ziggy” Liloia
Natural Building Workshops & more
P.S.: By the way, I’m greatly looking forward to the next book!
Bill and Athena Steen, the straw bale/earthen plaster maestro/maestra team from Arizona are helping build this home, which will be featured in our new book, Small Homes.
Bill writes: “Interior adobe wall in a clay-plastered straw bale house we are helping our boys build in Sonoita, AZ.”
(Bill shoots pretty much all his photos with an iPhone — has been doing it for a few years. I’ve finally come around to doing this. Both of us still use the big cameras (him a Nikon, me an Olympus OM-D) for serious shoots, but the iPhone for everyday shots. The new iPhone 6s Plus has a super new camera.)
I built a hut with a tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud and stone walls. This has been my most ambitious primitive project yet and was motivated by the scarcity of permanent roofing materials in this location. Here, palm thatch decays quickly due to the humidity and insects. Having some experience in making pottery I wondered if roof tiles could feasibly be made to get around these problems. Another advantage of a tiled roof is that it is fireproof. A wood-fired, underfloor heating system was installed for cold weather. A substantial wall of mud and stone were built under the finished roof. It should be obvious that this is not a survival shelter but a project used to develop primitive technological skills.
My name is Atulya K. Bingham and I run The Mud earthbag building website (www.themudhome.com). I hope my story inspires a few others to go for their dreams too.
I always wanted to write, and like many writers it was a passion I had to crowbar in between slabs of paid work. Then one day I had enough of compromising. Fortunately, I owned a small square of land in Turkey. I moved up there with a tent and not much else. It was the beginning of an adventure that changed every preconceived idea about what actually made me happy. Six months later, with only $6000 left and winter a month away, I gathered a team and embarked on the construction of a small earthbag house. I had zero building experience at the time.
Building my house was probably the most transformative thing I’ve ever taken on (and I’m no stranger to adventure). I ran out of money, made a heap of mistakes and was continually hounded by naysayers. But today I’m sitting inside that beautiful handcrafted home. Not one drop of cement was used and it is 100% solar-powered. My earthbag house has enabled me to leave behind the drudge of a job my heart wasn’t in and spend my days creating and writing instead. I love it.
A young family is making a last-ditch effort to save its cherished “hobbit house” from the bulldozers after planners deemed it had to be razed.
Charlie Hague and Megan Williams used natural materials to lovingly build their roundhouse tucked away in southwest Wales. But the pair, both 27, applied for planning permission only after moving in with their newborn son, Eli, in 2012.
Though many local people did not even know the small building was there, planners ruled the house did not fit in with the surrounding Pembrokeshire countryside and decided it had to go.
Lloyd Kahn will present “Fifty Years of Natural Building” at the San Francisco Maker Faire, on Saturday May 16, from 12-12:30 at the Maker Stage. You can visit our booth in the Homegrown Village to get great deals on our books. The Faire is incredibly fantastic; check it out!
My first building in 1961, in Mill Valley, California, a studio with what is now called a “living roof”
I actually started building in 1960 and soon thereafter started shooting photos and interviewing builders for our series of books on handmade housing. In those days we didn’t call it “natural building,” but that’s what it was. In our book Shelter in 1973, a section of the book was devoted to these materials: wood, adobe, stone, straw bale, thatch, and bamboo. I guess we were natural before it was called “natural.”
A month or so ago, Cheryl Long, the editor at The Mother Earth News, asked me if I could do a talk on natural building at the TMEN fair in Albany, Oregon (near Corvallis) on the first weekend in June. As I was getting the materials together, the Maker Faire asked if I could do a presentation at their annual event in San Mateo, California, on May 16. Read More …
Underhill is an incredible hobbit-home eco-cave house built into a hillside. The off-the-grid house is cleverly constructed to resemble a cave. With no electricity in the house, the stone, wood and rustic features truly make you feel like you’re stepping back in time.
One of the most common questions we get asked is “How do I learn how to build a tiny home?” A very superior answer would be the Yestermorrow School in Waitsfield, Vermont offering over 100 hands-on courses per year in design, construction, woodworking, and architectural craft including a variety of courses concentrating in sustainable design and green building. Yestermorrow is one of the only design/build schools in the country, teaching both design and construction skills. Hands-on courses are taught by top architects, builders, and craftspeople from across the country. Read More …
“…as a tribute to the alpine experience and the famed writer, Swiss studio Bureau A has sited their project ‘Antoine’ within the vast, mountainous expanse of the Alps. commissioned during an artist residency at the Verbier 3D Foundation, the architecture-cum-sculpture is inhabitable and structurally functional, comprising an indoor cabin with a fireplace, bed, table, stool and window. literally hanging on the rock-fall field, the small wooden dwelling hides its internal features within a projected concrete rock, deriving its shape from natural elements in its surrounding environment…”
In 1973 we published Shelter, which turned out to be station central for people interested in creating their own homes. Now, in the 21st century, we continue this dialog here online on shelter, carpentry, homesteading, gardening, and the home arts with this blog. We hope you will join us and contribute.
