The Tallest Little Straw Bale in Texas: An Eco-Friendly House With an Organic Atmosphere
(Page 2 of 3)
July/August 2003
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
As an engineer and the primary builder of their home—which, in the end, became the tallest straw bale building in Texas—Ken was also excited by the freedom that straw bale offered. “There wasn’t a whole lot of information out there—also not a lot of rules,” he says. “The fun, for me, is figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”
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Straw bale hadn’t reached the level of acceptance, even in the Austin area, that it has today. The couple’s friends made three little pigs jokes and predicted the home would be infested with rats. But the Longs did their homework and discovered that straw bale taverns built in Europe centuries ago are still standing. “It was a known art, and now it’s a lost art,” Ken says. “I like that.”
“People want what they’re familiar with—and that comfort zone is something you need to get over,” Joanne adds.
“You gotta let yourself go—be fine with experimenting and not worry about what somebody else might say,” Ken agrees. “If we thought a lot about it, we might have said, ‘This is too far out to be acceptable to most.’ But our only criteria was that we had to like it.”
Choosing straw bale construction simplified many of the smaller decisions that can plague homebuilders. Clay walls, earthen floors, and stone baseboards just seemed natural within the organic atmosphere created by the bale walls. “Those were all little experiments compared with the big decision to go with straw in the first place,” says Ken.
Quality, not quantity
Ken and Joanne hired a straw bale contractor just to get the building under way. The builders helped arrange a straw bale party, during which friends—many of them women—hoisted bales and pinned personal notes into the walls. “The whole house is filled with love letters,” Joanne says.
After the party, Ken took over, doing as much work as possible to keep costs down. He hired framers to put up beams for the 12-foot-high ceilings and the 28-foot-high peak in the living room, a stone crew to build the home’s three fireplaces and baseboards, and a stucco crew. Still, he says, there’s no denying that straw bale building is more expensive. “Even when you’re doing it yourself, you’re not doing straw bale to save money. If this were more cost effective, all builders would be doing it.”
Ken and Joanne’s home cost roughly $150 per square foot, but as Ken points out, they didn’t “cheap out” on the details. Because of the tall ceilings and the three-story living room space, the home’s 3,600 square feet of volume yield only 2,100 square feet of living space. The home includes features the couple wasn’t willing to compromise on: three fireplaces and extensive custom stonework, low-e Lincoln wood windows, three- to four-foot overhangs, and acoustic cedar ceilings and soffits. “This is our retirement home, and we’re going to live in it for the rest of our lives,” Joanne says. “So we said, for this quality, to get what we want, how small should we build?”