Deep Roots, Strong Branches
(Page 2 of 3)
November/December 2007
By Lori Tobias
Thinning diseased, invasive and wind-bent trees is more akin to gardening, Gundersen says. And because whole trees are stronger than milled ones, he uses trees that conventional builders typically overlook. “Trees make really strong curves,” he says. “This is a whole frontier of design that machined building materials can’t touch.”
RELATED CONTENT
Oh Christmas Tree! November/December 2003 By Jim Minick On Christmas morning when the family is gat...
Built with the philosophy of harmony and balance, this home can rightfully be called a straw bale m...
A Puerto Rican man builds a sustainable tree house using bamboo construction....
Have an eco-friendly holiday by making a reusable Christmas tree trunk....
This home is built with weedy, whole trees that would have otherwise gone to waste....
Slow, local building
At Chrysalis Farm, Gundersen walked the wooded acres, selecting each tree to serve a particular purpose. Steven is fond of hickory trees, so Gundersen used it to build his room. He filled Marcia’s room with birch, which reminds her of her childhood trips to northern Minnesota.
Gundersen’s crew built cabinets from old burr oak that had been stored in the barn for years, and a local sawyer milled willow trees for trim and pine for flooring. “Willow isn’t a hard wood,” he says. “I talked with a lot of woodworkers who had never seen this wood before, and they were surprised it has such an amazing grain. It looks like an Impressionist painting.”
Whole branching box alder and elm trees frame Marcia and Steven’s 2,160-square-foot structure; the poles framing the second floor and roof also were harvested from the land. The roof is made of wind-bent tree beams; the rafters are aspen trunks harvested from a neighbor who was replacing a stand with fruit trees. Spanning the rafters is a ferro-cement shell made from Ecolutions hemp, a vapor barrier, wire mesh and stucco. Straw bales overlaid with curved 2-by-4 wood purlins (throw-aways from a wood kiln) insulate the metal roof. “It’s strong, rigid and fire-resistant,” Gundersen says.
To harvest the wood, Marcia and Steven’s draft horse team skidded trees to the house, and a local miller used a bandsaw powered by recycled vegetable oil to rough-cut the logs into lumber. Gundersen’s crew dried the trees and lumber in a solar kiln and re-sawed wood for cabinets, trim and framing.
“It’s sort of a ‘slow food’ process,” Gundersen says. “But you’re not just building a house, you’re building a local economy. On a conventional house, about 50 percent of costs typically go to labor. On this house, the ratio was closer to 75 percent labor with 25 percent material costs. That’s an important aspect of natural building—it can be locally sourced from within the community.”
Whole-tree architecture is also economical. Marcia and Steven built their three-bedroom home for $200,000 (about $100 per square foot for finished space)—well below the national average for a custom home (about $135 per square foot).