Tiny House Design

One of my regular readers, Mark, sent me a link to this great Strawbale construction portal. The website is packed with great information including some plans. Below is an example from a set of free plans they offer for a 10×14 strawbale building. Mark is working on converting them to metric and is considering building one himself. Thanks again Mark!

Strawbale Construction Portal

Oliver Swann, the fellow behind NaturalHomes.org, sent me news today about progress at Green Hamlet, an ecovillage under construction in Pupki, Poland. They have planning permission to build four buildings but the best news is that tiny homes under 35 square meters (376 square feet) can be built without official permission. The larger buildings will serve as the shared spaces (main house, barn, meeting hall and workshop). The smaller buildings will be constructed using natural building methods like cord wood and straw bales.

In July 2010 four 5-day construction workshops will be lead by Tony Wrench. You can see the natural houses Tony builds on his website, That Roundhouse. Below is a short video that shows the step-by-step construction of a cord wood roundhouse with a reciprocal roof.

While cord wood roundhouses don’t suit all aesthetic tastes they are a remarkable example of truly sustainable architecture and that a home can pretty much be built out of anything. For more information about the upcoming workshops visit the Green Hamlet website. Thanks for the tip Oliver!

Continue Reading »

I really like the ingenuity of the fellow behind the website naturalhomes.org. This is the website dedicated to houses built from natural materials like cob, adobe, straw bale, stone, dirt, and so on. You’ll find examples of natural homes from all over the world. Some are big but many are tiny houses. Oliver Swann, the fellow behind the website, has been busy putting together all sorts of cool ways of exploring the world of natural and tiny homes. Here are a couple of good examples of what I mean.

Tiny House Map

Tiny House Slide Show

If you haven’t visited naturalhomes.org recently be sure to check it out. You might also want to follow naturalhomes on Twitter. I do and Oliver always posts good stuff.

I just spotted this on Shedworking.co.uk. It’s a tiny strawbale house offered by amazonails, the leading strawbale building company in the UK. This tiny house is their answer to a growing demand for tiny strawbale houses.

Their website is filled with a lot of alternative building techniques like cement-free tire foundations and using lime instead of cement as a binder for stone and brick. They also provide nice overviews of the various strawbale construction techniques and recommendations for extending insulating qualities of homes.

If you’re in the UK, or are inclined to travel, you might want to enroll in one of their workshops or even hire them to consult on your strawbale project. For those outside the UK the amazonails website provide a lot of great information useful for informing your future materials choice or strawbale project.