Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor clothing brand Patagonia, has just added straw bale home construction to the long list of his environmentally friendly deeds, Fast Company reports. Straw bale ...

David and Carrie Chew live in a house made of straw. It has two bathrooms, a modern kitchen and a packed earthen floor. The exterior walls are made with stacked wheat straw bales covered in plaster.

While the idea of building with straw bales is not new, the eco-friendly approach to building has been gaining interest in the past 15 years. In the low-tech method, bales of straw are typically ...

Yvon Chouinard and the architect who designed his Ventura, California, home explain why the waste material is the next step in the fight against climate change. Photo by Tim Davis and landscaping by ...

HOVLAND -- A half-mile down a dirt driveway through woods, a stack of straw bales signals one's arrival at Chris and Cameron Norman's new home. Approach the house, and the scattering of straw on the ...

When completed this spring, the 26,900-sf Friends Community School in Greenbelt, Md., will be one of the largest straw-bale structures in the world. The Building Team specified straw-bale construction ...

Sharon Van Hassel still remembers the laughter, the meals and the dirt flying through the air roughly 25 years ago as she, her late husband and neighbors built a home, straw bale by straw bale. That’s ...

The idea of a straw building might bring to mind a medieval homestead, or perhaps the fairy-tale dwelling of The Three Little Pigs. Used since the 19th century—typically as a rural, rustic building ...

Homes filled with the 18-inch thick, tightly packed bales of straw are better insulated than traditionally built homes.Rhodes estimates that using straw as insulation will save about 25 percent on ...

BROWNSVILLE, Ore. (AP) - A Brownsville couple is building Linn County's first straw-bale house. Don Andrews and his partner, Cheryl Haworth, have purchased some 325 bales of wheat straw from a local ...

When Mike Evans and his colleagues at the Tree of Life Nursery near San Juan Capistrano, Calif., began constructing some of their buildings in straw more than 10 years ago, they had good reasons: · ...