The Tallest Little Straw Bale in Texas: An Eco-Friendly House With an Organic Atmosphere

A couple of empty nesters throw caution to the wind by building a three-story straw bale house on the banks of Lake Travis.

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The home of Joanne and Ken Long lies close to Lake Travis in central Texas. Their backyard stair-steps down, with limestone terracing, to the water’s edge. The couple worked hard to understand the energy and layout of their property before even beginning to build this house.
Photography By Paul Bardagjy
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Some things are just meant to be. Ken and Joanne Long’s three-story straw bale home perched above Lake Travis, outside of Austin, Texas, appears to be one of them.

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For years, the empty nesters had been looking for a lakefront lot in the increasingly pricey Lake Travis area. They’d coveted a wooded half-acre on a peninsula formed by the meeting of Lake Travis and the Pedernales and Colorado rivers, with panoramic water views and easy boat access, but the asking price was well beyond their means. Frustrated but determined, they kept searching until one day in 1993 they got a call from a mortgage company, telling them their dream property had been foreclosed on. The land was on the market for half the original asking price—exactly what Ken and Joanne could pay.

They snapped it up, of course, and a few years later bought adjoining lots for a small guesthouse and the septic system. Over the next couple of years, they spent weekends building stone terraces and the guesthouse—and enjoying some boating, barbecuing, and beer drinking. “We wanted to get the feel of the land before we built,” Joanne says. Adds Ken: “We had a feel for where we wanted to be at certain times of the day to really enjoy the property.”

Ken and Joanne spent two years working on their home’s design. Joanne would sit down by the lake and look up the bluff, sketchpad in hand. She envisioned a tall building, spiraling up out of the bluff, with a nautically inspired watchtower and a porthole window. “I followed no principles but my own intuition,” she says. “I’m not so much into feng shui, but into energy movement. I would just sit and sketch, letting it flow.”

She calls the open, lodge-like style that emerged “New Age Craftsman” and considers it a reaction to our modern techno-age. “People want to feel grounded and earthy,” she says. “And if we don’t, we’re going to get out of balance.”

The freedom of straw bale

But what would this home be built out of? Ken and Joanne knew they wanted something casual, rustic, and comfortable—an informal feeling for a vacation-like spot. They considered and rejected several options, including a log cabin, before Joanne discovered straw bale, which was just starting to gain popularity in the Austin area.

“I visited a couple of houses built with straw bales—very basic designs,” Joanne says. “Inside, I felt like I was in the womb. I said, ‘I want this feel,’ although I didn’t want such a basic look. I wanted to make it into something sculptural and wonderful. I told Ken, ‘I don’t want it to be dumb-normal.’”

Skeptical at first, Ken accompanied Joanne to see a straw bale home being built in nearby Dripping Springs. “It looked comfortable,” he says. “I liked the non-formal finish. We weren’t that excited about anything for the lot until we discovered straw bale—and then we said, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ When it was right, there was no question.”

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