Tiny House Blog

According to the Lammas ecovillage in Wales, living in the future means looking to the past. This series of videos shows the baby ecovillage’s plans and struggles to develop a low impact village in the open countryside. The series also profiles several other successful ecovillages around Europe. The village is named after the pagan holiday that celebrates the abundance of the fall months.

Lammas is the United Kingdom’s first planned ecovillage and is sited on 76 acres of mixed pasture and woodland in Pembrokeshire. The houses use low-impact architecture which uses a combination of recycled and natural materials. The village will contain five detached buildings and one terrace of four dwellings. The homes will be built of straw bale, earth, timber frame and cob; they will have turf roofs and wool insulation and will blend into the landscape.

The videos (also available as podcasts) cover everything from searching for land, working with local codes, inspectors and design councils, examples of different types of natural building including straw bale and cob, surviving cold weather, self-sufficiency, growing your own food, and keeping community intact. The ecovillages profiled are Cae Mabon, The Village, Ireland and Findhorn. That Roundhouse by Tony Wrench is also featured. Continue Reading »

By Dan Price

In 1990, I moved back to my home state of Oregon intent on living in a tipi and getting rid of mortgages or rent. I looked for a suitable piece of property for months and finally located a 2 acre meadow next to the Wallowa River near the town of Joseph. The owners agreed that I could set up a tipi there in exchange for clearing downed trees and repairing the fence lines. A few months later I moved out of a small room up town and into the tipi full time. I spent three seasons in that 16 ft tipi.

In order to simplify, I sold the tipi and built a 9 ft X12ft red willow hut, complete with carpeting and blanket door and proceeded to live in that space for 2 years. Luckily I was able to put in underground electricity early on so was able to have lights and a small heater which helped in the winter months. The came a time when my Moonlight Chronicle zine got a corporate sponsorship from Simple Shoes in California and I spent the next 4 years mostly traveling around drawing and writing. Continue Reading »

Review by Kasey March

About two months ago my boyfriend, Shane, sent me an odd text, “Can you take off from work July 8 – 11?”

“I think so, why?”

“We’re going on vacation.”

And so began the Super Secret Vacation saga. For weeks I guessed where we might be going and worried about what to pack.

“Are we camping?”
“Maybe.”
“Ok, we’re camping. We can’t be going South – it’s too hot. Are we hiking?”
“Maybe”
“Do I need a bathing suit?”
“Yes.”

And on it went until July 8th when we got into the car. All I knew was that we were camping in West Virginia. But what on Earth was in West Virginia?

When we pulled into Taproot Farm (taprootfarm.info) I thought we were lost and asking for directions to a nearby state park. Then I met Beth Reese, a gracious and friendly woman who greeted us as if we were old friends – not strangers who had just pulled down her long drive way, uninvited, to ask for directions. She and Shane were chatting away when I saw Sigi Koko’s green VW bug with Build Naturally scrawled across the back bumper. It clicked.

Querencia

Continue Reading »

The Cae Mabon Retreat Centre in North Wales has been building small, natural dwellings for their residents and visitors since 1989. This intentional community is located in the best of what nature can offer: in the woods, by a river, near a lake, at the foot of the mountains and within sight of the sea.

Cae Mabon’s principal creator is Eric Maddern, who was inspired to create the community after spending time with the Aboriginal people in Alice Springs, Australia. He wanted to create a place that was not the ostentatious beauty of the wealthy but the humble beauty of the simple and natural. The buildings he created are mostly made from timber, stone, reed, straw, grass, lime and clay and they blend in with their surroundings. Continue Reading »

This movie is entitled “Off The Treadmill” and is about getting out of mortgage debt by using the very ground we stand on to build our own homes. “It’s dirt cheap”, says Ianto Evans, master cob builder and architect at Cob Cottage in Southern Oregon. This film was created by Chris Tilt.

Earth is still the world’s most common building material. The word cob comes from an old English root meaning a lump or rounded mass. Cob building requires the use of hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw. This is a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. Cob construction is easy to learn and is inexpensive to build. Because there are no forms, ramming, cement or rectilinear bricks, cob lends itself to organic shapes: curved walls, arches and niches. Earth homes are cool in summer, warm in winter. Cob’s resistance to rain and cold make it ideally suited to cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, and to desert conditions.

It’s estimated that half of the world’s population lives in earth buildings, but for many countries this type of architecture was until recently fairly rare. Now materials like rammed earth, cob, compressed earth and mud brick are experiencing a comeback.

A modern cob home- Cobtun House- in England won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ sustainability award and went on to sell for well over a million dollars (750,000 pounds). And cob is just a simple mix of clay and straw (though sand or some sort of grit is often used as well).

Cob is cheap- the walls of Cobtun House cost just 20,000 pounds- and infinitely recyclable. It’s also a very green building material for plenty of other reasons.

It’s a local material: the clay and sand are most often extracted from the property where the building is built. It’s energy efficient: cool in the summer, warm in the winter and fire-resistant. It’s efficient with space since cob buildings are smaller than the average American home.

A cob home is also a perfect DIY project since the materials can be mixed with your hands and feet and molded freeform- without support structures- to create a house (See books like The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage).

In this video, Margaret Krome-Lukens of North Carolina’s Pickard’s Mountain Eco-Institute shows us the cob home- refreshingly cool on a hot summer’s day- that interns Mike and Greg are building for her on the property. They talk about the horse manure used as an additive to the walls, how the material is so easy to sculpt, the green roof and living small. Since her new home is less than 150 square feet, Margaret talks about the joy of giving up stuff to move in.

This roundhouse, built of cordwood, cob, straw and recycled windows, is located in southwest Wales and owned by Tony Wrench. It’s not only a low impact, natural dwelling built with what was on hand, but it’s become a symbol for the rights of natural builders within the United Kingdom.

The house was built in 1997 by Tony and featured solar power, a wind turbine, composting toilet and reed beds for gray water. Tony based this house on American Indian designs he had seen in history books. In the past, he had had experience building “wacky structures” and wanted to live as close to the land as possible. Even though he built it inside Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, with agreement from the owners of the land, he never got permission for the structure from the local planning board. After several court appearances, he and his partner, Jane, decided to demolish it in 2004, but changed their minds after public demonstrations persuaded them not to. The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority attempted to get a court injunction to force Tony to demolish it, but were persuaded to allow it to stay up until July 2006, when they could re-apply under the new Low Impact Policy. In 2008, the committee voted to give Tony a conditional for three years. So – the roundhouse still stands. Continue Reading »