Organically Grown: A Hand-built Home in the Southwest
A rural Arizona hand-built house made of adobe, stone, straw bale and native timbers.
November/December 2002
By Marsha Scarbrough
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Photography by Terrence Moore
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“We live what we do,” says Sherry Luna. “For us, it’s about saving the earth.” She and her husband, Philip Ostrom, own New Harvest Organics, the largest Arizona-based marketer of organic produce. Their home is a “nest” that expresses their ecological values. Perched on a hilltop with vistas of rugged red cliffs and gentle green oak trees, the hand-built house of sun-baked adobe, stone, straw bale, and native timber blends seamlessly into the dramatic terrain.
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“It was challenging to marry straw bale with adobe with concrete blocks with stone,” explains Phil. But besides integrating diverse materials, designing the house challenged the couple to integrate opposing ideas. Sherry wanted the house sheltered by the earth, but they both wanted windows to reveal the breathtaking views and take advantage of solar gain. Phil wanted a round house. Sherry wanted straight walls. Phil likes small spaces. Sherry hates clutter and wanted expansive rooms for entertaining. Both wanted to integrate the house into the surrounding landscape.
The pair, who has integrated their lives for seventeen years, met the challenge. The curved face of the house mirrors the topography of the hillside. In front, pillars of adobe bricks frame large arched windows while the back nestles into the earth. A few steps down from the open kitchen and great room, a cozy bedroom wing is tucked under a living sod roof supported by vigas arranged like the spokes of a wheel. On the upper level, a copper roof collects rainwater and channels it into underground cisterns. Graywater from sinks and showers irrigates the organic fruit orchard.
A grand adventure
Manifesting this vision was an adventure that spanned four years of ups, downs, twists, turns, and life-changing surprises. After a decade of searching for the perfect place to settle down, Sherry and Phil bought five and half acres crisscrossed by two creeks near Patagonia, Arizona, a town of 980 people surrounded by wilderness. It’s an hour’s drive south of Tucson and eighteen miles north of the Mexican border.
They lived in a 1974 Airstream trailer and put up a yurt to house their office. With the help of local builder Ted Piper, they built a 300-square-foot load-bearing straw bale guest house in the oak trees along the creek and moved into it. They dreamed of building a bigger house and asked permaculturist Kate y Tirion how to site it on the land. She pointed out that the creeks had high flood zones and the creek beds were lush with manzanita and oak, both hot-burning fuel for wildfires. For maximum passive solar advantage, Tirion suggested siting the house above the shade of the trees. As Sherry and Phil considered building on the hilltop, they remembered hikes they took to Native American cliff dwellings near Sedona. “We were sitting in this cave in the cliff dwellings, looking out, and one of us said, ‘This is how we should live,’” recalls Sherry.
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