A Hobbit House

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Gary and a third-generation stonemason hauled boulders to build the dry-rubble foundation, the doorway, and the fireplace. Gary created the window seat out of granite and a cedar log that he found in the nearby woods. His wife, Delores, a stained-glass artist, made the dining room windows, below right. Paul Bardagjy

Don’t ever tell Gary Zuker it can’t be done.

A decade ago, the University of Texas computer engineer set out to build a small, inexpensive weekend getaway and eventual retirement home on 2 acres of wooded land, just up the hill from Lake Travis outside of Austin, Texas. The only way to achieve his goal of building this place for $10,000, it seemed, was to build it himself.

Zuker had no carpentry experience and didn’t even own a saw, but he did have very definite ideas about what he wanted: a low-maintenance house that was rustic, timeless, even primal.

Zuker turned to Austin’s resident sustainable-building guru Pliny Fisk, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems. Fisk was helping to build a home out of modified cob known as Leichtlehmbau, a lightweight mixture of straw and clay. After a day of cob crew duty, mixing clay, water, and straw, and packing it into forms, Zuker realized, “Hey, anybody can do this. It’s simple.”

He spent weeks poring over ancient texts in the university’s historical library. He was charmed by the drawings of medieval straw-clay ­cottages and found reference to a ­fifteenth-century cob structure that is still standing. He discovered cob buildings in climates as varied as Ireland, New Zealand, and Greece—all with a common look but unique bearings. “I figured if these guys could build this with no education and no money—buildings that last like that and look gorgeous—that’s for me,” Zuker recalls.

Zuker pulled together a straw-clay recipe based on historical documents and modern-day innovations. “Real cob is mostly earth with straw as a binder,” he explains. “Leichtlehmbau, a German term for light straw-clay, is a legitimate extension of it. You add more straw and use only clay to cut down on the amount of earth and increase insulation.”

A mule load of clay mixed with a cart load of straw was typical of the ­centuries-old recipes Zuker found. “But once I got started, it was like cooking. When putting sauce on spaghetti, you can tell when you have enough. When you start to pack the stuff into walls, if the mud drips, you have too much clay. If the straw doesn’t pack hard, you don’t have enough clay.”

Zuker bought 250 bales of straw at $1.50 a bale from nearby farmers. He had 6 cubic yards of blue clay, which a gravel company was hauling out of a local pit, delivered for $25. “Wet clay is nasty stuff, the kind of clay that creates the stickiest, muckiest mess,” he says.