A House Made of What?

Straw Finds Niche as Eco-Friendly Building Material

If there is one thing that fairy tales tell us about civil engineering, it is not to build anything using dried-out stalks of grain. This is the First Little Pig's Law of Construction: Violate it, and a strong wind or heavy-breathing wolf will come along, and whoosh! You're standing on a bare slab.

Despite this warning, a few people in the Washington area have been building things -- walls, homes and even, good heavens, a school -- out of straw.

Such structures have straw instead of drywall and insulation, with dozens of bales stacked around the buildings' wood-and-metal skeletons. The bales are coated in hardened plaster, which keeps out water and fire and gives buildings a stucco look.

Some designers say straw is ideal for "green" building because it recycles farm waste and saves energy by keeping interiors cool. Last week, as workers were completing projects at a city building in Bowie and a school in College Park, straw-bale fans said the "Three Little Pigs" story had the whole thing wrong.

"There's no reason it can't work," said Peter Curtis, a member of the board at Friends Community School, whose almost-finished campus in College Park uses nearly 4,000 bales. "It just hasn't been adopted around here yet."

As unusual as they sound, straw buildings aren't a new idea. In the late 1800s, people in a particularly treeless corner of Nebraska began using straw and hay to make the prairie equivalent of an igloo: They stacked up bales and slapped on a roof.

Now, straw seems to be finding a new niche, nationally and locally. However, statistics are difficult to come by. The International Straw Bale Building Registry lists 538 projects nationwide, but the site says that might be a low estimate. Designers in the Washington area say that a handful of projects are done and that they're finding strong interest in building more.

"I have clients walk in and say, 'I want your house,' " said Bill Hutchins, a Takoma Park architect who used bales in an addition to his century-old bungalow. Hutchins painted the thick, adobe-like walls in dreamy earth tones and accented the house with natural wood, for a kind of hobbits-in-Santa Fe look.

"What I love about it, it's just so alive," he said, rubbing a wall in the TV room. Hutchins said he has built four projects in the mid-Atlantic with straw and has six on the drawing board.

The reason for the resurgence in straw construction is not a scarcity of lumber; wood is as close as the nearest Home Depot. Instead, the appeal comes from the material's environmental credentials. The green building movement has adopted "green roofs," which have plants that absorb storm runoff, and toilets that compost waste instead of flushing it. In straw-bale projects, the change is in a building's bones.

The straw that's used is a kind of farm leftover, the stalks left behind when such grains as wheat are harvested. Unlike hay, which is a different crop grown for animal feed, straw is used primarily for animal bedding. Usually, straw-bale builders say, there's more of it than anyone needs.

"We're consuming a waste product, basically," said Polly Bart, a straw-bale builder based in Butler, Md., north of Baltimore.