Straw bales have been used over the past hundred years for building. Building with straw bales, whether it be rice or wheat, not only helps the environment but looks amazing.

Straw bales are a natural, renewable energy resource which would otherwise be buried or burned as the straw bales are created from the stubble after the crop has been harvested for other means.

There are many methods to building with straw bales around the world.  We use the most up to date techniques which have been proven over decades to work.

There are many straw bale homes around Australia. Straw bale homes make a lot of sense in cold climates such as in the Blue Mountains, as well as hotter climates or areas which are extreme in temperatures.

We prefer to build sustainable homes using strawbales and solid earth walls so that you have thermal mass and insulation in your home. Having built homes all around Australia (including our own personal homes) over the past decade, we have found that this way of building straw homes is a much more effective way of regulating the temperature in your home, especially in extreme climates.

In winter, we position an earth wall (made from rammed earth, cobb walls which are solid earth/clay walls, poured earth or mud bricks) near the fireplace which warms up this wall to radiate heat back into your home. There are other techniques we use to circulate the warmth from your fireplace to the rest of your home.

Also we design your straw home so that the sun warms up your floor, thus the term “solar passive design” – the sun warms your home naturally without artificial means.

Then we use earth-rendered strawbale walls on the south or western sides of your home to insulate your home from the extreme summer sun and to keep the warmth in on the south side of your home. So together we use strawbales and solid earth walls so that we can keep as regular a temperature as we can inside.

We then use verandahs, pergolas, trees and deciduous trees to assist in protecting the windows in summer and ensuring the sun enters the windows in winter. There is quite a knack to designing an effective solar passive home which is sustainable. It’s definitely not rocket science but it has taken many years to get the right mix of natural materials and designs to get it right. We are always improving our designs for the best results. We have tried these designs on our own homes as we feel that’s a better way to ensure we get the right results! We don’t believe in testing on other people’s homes!

Building a strawbale home can be relatively easy. There are many options you can take.

You can design your own straw home and owner build to construct it yourself.

You can then potentially save money by buying salvaged materials and do some of the work yourself. The main thing is getting the right skills to ensure you get a finished product which will last for decades and decades, as all strawbale homes ought to.

These days building a home with straw should be as good as building conventional homes. Don’t settle for anything less! Do your homework, go do workshops and if you have to, hire the right people who will guarantee their product (see examples of their work). Like any building trade, there are techniques which work and others which don’t work as well. Find out who have been building strawbale homes for a living and have built their own homes. Also, working with licensed builders and/or tradesmen is highly recommended.

If you work to a budget and timeframe, have access to funds and are a good organizer, owner building can be very rewarding. Most people underestimate the time it takes to build and get things done so multiply your estimates of time and costs. Get quotes of the work for accurate estimates. Owner building a straw home is like taking on a job, if you allow enough time per day to do it, you can complete your strawbale home as you plan to. If you don’t have the time (you have full time work), allow years to finish your straw home! It’s just realistic. Believe us, we’ve done it ourselves!

You can also design and construct your own strawbale home.

We’ve done the hard work and come up with architecturally designed strawbale homes which are affordable. Our clients just choose the design they like and we build it as well. They will save over $30,000 in architectural and engineer’s fees just by choosing from a set design. They save more money as we have designed these homes around strawbales to make sure the design fits around the size of the strawbale. This is a massive cost saving.

Some people prefer to design their own home as they are happy to put in the work and research to come up with a sustainable, solar passive home. They may not have designed a home before so there may be things that they haven’t thought of, but most of our clients know this. They also know that they may not have design skills of an architect, but they’re happy with the look as it’s organic and something they can call their own. It’s individual and we understand this. So if you have plans already drawn up, we can quote on how much it will cost to build.

We recommend that anyone wanting to design their own straw home that they include a builder or whoever they envisage will build it, to be involved with the design of their straw home. You will save yourselves time and energy by including a builder as they can help you and the designer with keeping the design in line with your budget.

Do yourself a favour and work with trades people who have done this work before or at least done work experience rather than say they’re happy to give it a go. When you’re learning a new skill, you will make mistakes. Mistakes cost time and money. 

You can choose one of our pre-designed plans made from straw and earth walls

So the hard work is done for you. They’re designed around the sun, where your views are and where the street entrance is. The designs can be flipped or rotated to suit your land. You can also change the internal layout of the designs as well to suit your lifestyle.