Catherine Wanek

Now in soft-cover, The New Strawbale Home offers information about solar siting, cost- and energy-savings, plus “design essentials” to avoid common complications during construction and to ensure a well-planned home. And strawbale homeowners share their building insights and hindsights. Lush color photographs throughout the book illustrate how building with bales encourages creativity whether the finished product is a sleek urban home, a mountain haven, or anything in between.

The New Straw Bale Home – Excerpt

A Straw Bale Future

A wonderful irony about straw-bale home owners is that they often started out as complete skeptics. “Doesn’t it rot? Doesn’t it burn? What about the Big Bad Wolf?” We converts who’ve heard this before have learned to smile patiently. After all, it was little more than a decade ago that modern-day pioneers seeking affordable, ecological, beautiful housing built the first code-approved straw-bale homes, and now they are found in every state in the U.S. and all over the world.

It’s not surprising so many have been converted by the amazing potential of the humble bale. Individually, a stalk of straw seems fragile, but hundreds together, compressed and baled, make a sturdy building block. Stack a bunch of these blocks together and walls can go up in a hurry – especially if you enlist your family and friends to help. Roof and plaster it, and you have an energy-efficient house -- the concept is simple and intuitive. And soft, sculptable straw bales can be shaped into cozy spaces, forming a home that feels like an embrace.

This home not only feels good, but you can feel good about it -- straw is commonly underutilized, composted or burned as an agricultural waste product. The “staff” of the staff of life, straw is available at a cheap price where ever grain is grown. Replacing conventional “stick frame” walls with bales can cut by half the amount of timber needed in a modern home, reducing demand on forest resources. And stacked like giant bricks to form a thick wall, bales offer super insulation from the heat or cold or noise outside, providing a quiet, comfortable living space with modest life-time energy requirements.

Building with bales could also impact “global warming,” by significantly reducing fossil fuel consumption. And saving fuel saves money. Straw-bale homeowners from New Mexico to Nova Scotia, California to China, live comfortably with energy bills that are a fraction of their neighbors. Constructed with care, these homes have successfully endured snow and rain, earthquakes and hurricanes.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS

Building with bales began over a century ago as pioneers began to settle in the sandhill country of Nebraska. Finding themselves in a sea of grass on a treeless prairie, they utilized the relatively new technology of horse-powered baling machines to create a stable building block from an abundant local resource. The pioneers saved their precious trees for roof structure, simply stacking up interlocking bales and plastering them with local mud or cement stucco, to create sturdy homes. But as soon as railroads came through, bringing brick and timber and other supplies, Nebraskans began building themselves “real” homes, and straw bale houses faded into history.

Enough examples of straw bale construction survive to give modern builders clues to durability and give confidence in the structural stability of bales. The Jim Sturtz homestead near Stapleton, built in 1905, was still lived in until recent years. It remains in good shape today, with a single diagonal crack in the stucco that indicates some structural settling. This is probably due to frost heave against its minimal foundation.

In Arthur, Nebraska two fine straw bale buildings are still in use today -- the Martin/​Monhart home, built in 1925, and the 1 ½ story Pilgrim Holiness Church, constructed in 1928. Initially coated with local gumbo mud, they have both been replastered with a cement-based stucco. The church is now a museum run by the Arthur Historical Society. During a renovation in 1976, builders left part of an original wall exposed, so visitors can appreciate its straw bale pedigree. This is the first example of what is now known as a “truth window.”

This truth window reveals a fascinating detail: Behind the thick coating of mud and stucco, the strings of the bales are clearly visible. Other historic photographs confirm that “Nebraska-style” straw bale buildings are not only load-bearing, but that the bales were stacked “on edge,” with the bale’s narrowest dimension making up the wall thickness. This fact astounds modern builders, and is a further testament to the strength and durability of a plastered straw bale wall system.

The Martin/​Monhart home also has a tale to tell, of a day when a tornado blew through town. In addition to enormous wind and pressure, the noise of a tornado has been compared to a freight train. After the funnel cloud swirled away from Arthur, relatives ran over to see how the residents had fared. Not only was the house undamaged, but the bale walls were so sound proof, that the Monharts were found playing cards at the dining table, oblivious to the weather outside.

In Huntsville, Alabama, a visionary doctor constructed a mansion of straw bales in 1938, utilizing bales as insulation for walls and ceilings between a concrete post-and-beam structure. As the story goes, Dr. Burritt was making his rounds one day and stopped to rest in a barn. Noting the cool comfort that straw bales provided, he resolved to build this way one day. The result is a handsome home with shingled exterior walls, and no hint of its bale insulation. The building has survived over six decades of deep south humidity and rainfall, and today the mansion continues to serve Huntsville as its city museum.

THE STRAW BALE REVIVAL

While the occasional straw bale building went up in the intervening decades, it was in the 1970s and 1980s that homesteaders, permaculturists and alternative builders motivated by the potential for affordable and sustainable shelter began rediscovering the concept of building with bales. During the last decade, perhaps ten thousand new strawbale homes have been built in North America, Europe, China, and across the globe.

A HOME FOR ALL CLIMATES

Architects and builders have successfully adapted strawbale designs to local climates, from the desert Southwest to the rainforests of the Pacific – provided they have a proper understanding of the materials and practiced careful construction. The few thousand straw bale homes built in North America in the last decade are generally proving to be durable and comfortable. And the user-friendly construction techniques empower tentative owner-builders to get involved with building their own dream home.

This is also a home that can last seven generations. Combined with natural plasters, solar design, daylighting, radiant heating and appropriate ventilation, a straw bale home can provide a durable and nurturing space to live in.

So, what does a straw-bale house look like? The answer is truly – what ever you want. From southwestern “Santa Fe style,” to north-country alpine approaches, to sleek urban designs, today’s architects and owner builders are thinking beyond the box and shaping the bale module in response to climate, regional traditions and to suit their personal esthetic preferences. Look within to discover a wide spectrum of design ideas, plus building insights and hindsights from all across North America. The preferred house of the 21st century may just be a straw-bale home.

Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 2003, 2009.