A home made of straw?

YOU can huff and you can puff, but you won’t blow Carol Atkinson’s house down, even though it is made of straw. It doesn’t have a thatched roof, but it does have walls made from straw: 90 bales and 33 half-bales. “You wouldn’t think it was made of straw, would you?” asks Carol, slapping the plastered walls with the flat of her hand. “It feels pretty solid.” And warm, too, as a result of the sheep fleeces used as underfloor insulation.

This is a home that is home-grown: being a farmer’s wife, Carol, pictured right, had lots of straw in her fields. And the insulating properties of straw are, she says, excellent. “In America, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark and Austria it’s very popular,” Carol says. “We’re just slow to catch on.”

There was another motivating factor. Carol, from Eastrington, near Howden, East Yorkshire, says that the foot-and-mouth and BSE crises took their toll on the family’s beef farm. “It’s a fact of life in farming today that you’ve got to diversify to bring money in. And we wanted to do something a bit different.”

Two years ago she began studying for an MSc in environmentally aware architecture and decided to create a mobile home from straw. The one-bed-room house, overlooking a lake on her farm, has a dual function: Carol rents it out to holidaymakers, while a study of its thermal properties will form part of her final architectural thesis: the straw walls make it 10C (50F) warmer than a conventional mobile home.

The straw house is an idea that just might find favour with Gordon Brown, who last month doubled the number of proposed eco-towns to ten. The developer of England’s first eco-town, at Hanham Hall, near Bristol, will shortly be revealed by English Partnerships. The second will be in Peterborough; the developer will be announced in the spring.

Initially Carol spent two weeks designing a model of the basic structure using Lego blocks. The property was to be constructed on a chassis (so it could be transported easily) and the external dimensions were set at 4m by 10m. “We could have made it bigger,” says Carol, “but then, by law, if we did ever want to move it down the road, we’d have to be escorted.” Work began in June 2006, when the straw was cut.

To help with the work, Carol found volunteers through Amazonails, a West Yorkshire consultancy that runs straw-bale building courses. It took 14 people five days to build the house inside a wooden framework (which was then removed), stacking the bales on spikes to form load-bearing walls. The walls were trimmed, and then plastered with lime render straight on to the straw. The exposed beams in the sitting room came from a barn door on her farm, and all the internal doors are reclaimed. There’s a solar hot-water panel, and a wind turbine powers the fridge and the lights (which are 12V). The cooker and immersion heater run off the mains.

The home’s internal walls are made of wood-fibre board rather than plasterboard; the former may be eco-friendly but it’s a pain to use. “After it’s in place, you have to rub clay into it and then put a coat of plaster on top,” says Carol. “Then you put a mesh on top of that to stop it cracking, add another coat of plaster and then a topcoat. As you’re doing all this, you begin to realise why builders prefer plasterboard.” There is an upside, though, besides the environmental benefit: because the clay absorbs moisture, the internal humidity of the house is regulated at all times.

The house took eight months to build and cost about £30,000. “But this was our first try,” says Carol. “I’m sure we could do it for less.” The only straw now visible is through the “truth window” that Carol’s son, Sam, made on the inside gable end “to remind us of the fabric of the building”.

Now Carol is gearing up to build a permanent straw cottage on her land. “The idea was to create a home that wouldn’t cost the Earth. I think we’ve achieved that.” The house is available for rent www.homegrownhome.co.uk

Tony Greenway
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