The Straw Bale House (A Real Goods Independent Living Book)

If you live in a cookie-cutter world of bland, expensive, mass-produced tract homes that do not quite appeal to you, the book The Straw Bale House just might serve as the medium necessary to escape the mundane. This definitive work opens our minds to the many practical advantages of straw bale construction. The book teaches us that this is a clean, inexpensive and lightweight building material that is very easy to work with. Straw also provides impressive advantages over conventional building materials. It has tremendous energy efficiency factors, superior fire resistance, and won't tumble in a quake. And as a renewable resource, because it is a byproduct of grain production, it is also ecologically sound. And most straw bale houses are built at a fraction of the cost of conventional homes.

The Straw Bale House provides many practical illustrations and photographs and makes this unique building process easy to understand. It is well worth the price if you are an experienced builder or just an interested novice looking at a practical, prudent way to build.

Last but not least, this book illustrates that inexpensive does not have to mean low quality or unattractive. Indeed, many people are attracted to straw bale homes because they are so often extraordinarily beautiful and inviting. After all, the natural materials used in these homes exude a lot of chi.

Get a leg up on the first Little Pig with The Straw Bale House, your guide to inexpensive, durable, earth-friendly construction that will stand up to much more than the Big Bad Wolf. Authors Athena Swentzell Steen and Bill Steen founded the Canelo Project, which promotes innovative building; David Bainbridge is a California restoration ecologist; and David Eisenberg is an alternative-materials builder who pioneered straw bale wall testing. Between them, they have encyclopedic knowledge of their subject. The book is comprehensive, broadly covering why and how to build with straw and then focusing on the details, which are both intellectually and aesthetically delightful.

Beside being cheap, clean, and lightweight, straw also provides advantages like energy efficiency and resistance to seismic stresses. For the nervous Martha Stewart types, there are scads of black-and-white and color plates of strikingly beautiful interiors and exteriors from New Mexico to southern France. Both new and experienced builders will appreciate the clear, simple instructions and diagrams, as well as practical explanations for dealing with building codes and insurers. The Straw Bale House shows us advantages so numerous and dramatic that you'll wonder why we ever moved on to sticks and bricks. --Rob Lightner