Four Good Natural Homes Websites

The Revolution Takes Us Home

Modern cob photo by Debbie Trelor Photography
Modern cob photo by Debbie Trelor Photography

This incredible site is a seemingly endless blog of amazing house photos. It’s similar to the tiny cabin site we featured a while back.
“the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” – Gaston Bachelard

Source: The revolution takes us home

Read more

Hyperadobe with EarthenHand

This is one of the best videos I’ve seen in illustrating how to go about building a project. In just a few short minutes it manages to show the construction process from foundation to roof, using lots of animated portions to speed it up. There are several particularly worthwhile aspects of this 800 square foot … Read more

Pedestrian and Garden Gates

Nice gate design
Nice gate design

The following photos show how gates can dramatically affect the appearance of a home. From simple to classic, each has a character all its own. It’s fun to browse websites and catalogs for design ideas to help visualize how your home will look.

Read more

A Cautionary Tale

Sometimes people send us emails asking specific questions about their personal projects, and we usually try to help them as best we can. Not long ago we got the following email with several photos attached:

earthbag dome

I came up with the idea of building my own dome here in south Morocco where I live. I got some refurbished polypropylene bags and decided to do a 5m diameter dome to provide a shelter for horse food and equipment.

I decided to use the soil from our garden which is very close to sea sand. Since this was an unstabilized soil, I decided to tie the bags very firmly at the top to prevent any sand from slipping out, and also damped the sand so it could be tamped better. I dug a trench down to half a meter that I leveled with double bags filled up with small rocks, and then started the courses of bags, with two barbed wire between each course. We went up to half a meter straight, and then started to corbel the bags inwards. We have been working for two weeks now in a team of four, and it’s getting quite high. I wasn’t planning on doing a loft, since there would be no use of it for me. I’m getting a bit worried as we are working at higher levels that the whole thing might collapse, so I thought I should give it a try asking your advice. It feels quite strong while working on it, but when tamping, you can really feel the strikes wherever you are placed up on the wall.

Read more

The Creative Mind – The Secret of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Success

Seth Peterson Cottage - Mirror Lake, Wisconsin – by Frank Lloyd Wright
Seth Peterson Cottage - Mirror Lake, Wisconsin – by Frank Lloyd Wright

“Taliesin Apprenticeship was the most important experience of my life. I was nineteen in September of 1959 when my father dropped me off at Tanyderi and drove off down the hill. The room assigned to me was on the top floor with an eastern view toward Taliesin in the distance. Each morning at sunrise I would awake and look over toward the sun rising over Taliesin. I was in paradise. I had come to Taliesin with one intention, to see if in my own mind I could be an architect. I wanted to design buildings the way Frank Lloyd Wright designed his architecture. I had decided I would stay at Taliesin until I learned how to do this.

Read more