Property in France - Building with straw

One measure I use of the increased acceptance of straw as a building material is the welcome reduction in three-little-pigs gags.

Now, nearly four years after the miraculous appearance of a house on a lotois hill built from a cereal by-product, locals and people who have seen the Grand Designs programme are more likely to ask, ‘How’s the house?’ I tell them that it’s still standing, that we’re very happy within our bale walls.

And why shouldn’t it still be standing? The oldest straw bale houses still standing in the USA date back to the turn of the last century. The raw material may be light enough to lift with one hand, but once covered inside and out with 4 or 5 cm of render, straw walls appear every bit as solid as traditional stone. Tap them, though, and they seem curiously hollow and yielding. Rather like a loaf of home-baked bread ‘fresh from t’oven’.

Moreover, we used a wooden framework to carry the weight of the roof. The bales, blocked up in a conventional running bond, were used merely as infill between all the uprights. In fact, any subsequent problems that we have experienced have been largely due to the wooden element – expanding and contracting, twisting and splitting.

There are many splendid things about building with straw. For a start, as is increasingly common knowledge, all those bundled hollow stems of cellulose provide a form of insulation that is second to none. And then there is the obvious environmental advantage of constructing a house with a natural waste product (which might otherwise be burnt).

A further advantage, not generally appreciated unless you try it for yourself, is that building with bales encourages experimentation. Apart from the likes of Barbara Jones and her intrepid band of UK bale builders, Amazon Nails, there are not many professional bale builders. You have to do it yourself. In the process, you discover just how adaptable straw bales can be. Once you learn to cut and re-tie them, you can just about bend them, shape them, any way you want them.

Practical skills

Though I sometimes shudder to think of the potential mess had the theory I imbibed from countless books not been blended with the creativity and nous of a friend and cohort (a Canadian computer technician), the message I try to give visitors is one of ‘possibility’. After all, if I – a cack-handed cerebral writer with few practical skills – can do it, then so can anyone.

It just takes plenty of belief – and a rather bizarre collection of tools for the job: scores of sharpened bamboo stakes for impaling and securing successive rows of bales; a chainsaw or, as we favoured, a disc cutter and a few lethal knives for cutting and shaping the bales; a large spool or two of blue twine for re-tying them; a ‘Great Persuader’ (a hefty home-made mace) for beating recalcitrant bales into place; a pair of cheap hedge clippers (from Lidl) for trimming the walls; a few rolls of glass-fibre netting to prepare reveals and lintels for rendering; and some green fencing wire for fashioning the giant staples with which to pin said netting to the straw.

Then you need to observe some fundamental principles, which have evolved (and continue to evolve) over time. Building with torchis or cob (clay and chopped straw) has a long and honourable tradition in both France and the UK. But the ‘build it with bales’ movement goes back only as far as the nineteenth century and theory is based largely on trial and error. Significantly, the body of knowledge derives mainly from Australia and from the western states of the USA: dry climates ideal for a material vulnerable not so much, as one might fear, to fire but to damp.

The generally temperate and wetter European climate should not be a deterrent – provided that you take certain precautions. Stock the bales somewhere dry. Sweep up diligently at the end of each day’s construction (as the chaff, unlike the dense bales themselves, can be highly flammable). Raise the bottom row of bales off the ground and build protective eaves. Ensure that the walls can breathe by using a lime or clay render (with no or limited cement, which ‘wicks’ moisture). Apply successive coats of lime wash or some other suitable breathable ‘skin’ over time.

Of course, you also have to source your bales. We were lucky. A friend of a friend had the arable fields and his boss had an old baling machine to fashion them into the traditional bales of, roughly, 80cm wide by 50cm thick by 35cm high. Harvested in mid heatwave, they were almost too dry – which sometimes hampered the cutting and re-tying. Our friendly young farmer sold me 460 bales at a euro apiece and agreed to stock them under a hangar till D-Day.

Modern farmers

However, as agricultural technology advances, so the old methods die out. Nowadays, the mini bales are as rare as the veteran baling machines. So it was with considerable interest that I went to see an embryonic straw bale house a few kilometres from home built with the big-format four-string bales favoured by modern farmers.

A decade ago, Jean-Claude and Nathalie Vergnes might have served as the stereotypical ‘alternative’ bale builders. A homespun couple in their middle age with a gaggle of sparky children and an assorted band of dogs and mogs, they live in a stone cottage and work the land. Across the field, under a huge sheltering metal hangar, their new house is nearing completion. They’ve built it entirely themselves. Their king-size bales each weigh around 100 kilos and provide massive 80cm-thick walls, which they’ve rendered (beautifully) with clay.

Moreover, they have opted for a load-bearing system. In other words, there is no wooden framework (other than the frames for doors and windows) and the bales bear the weight of the roof. This means that you have to compress the bales before constructing the roof – with a network of plastic belts, tightened progressively by hand. This took around six weeks and resulted in a consistent compression of roughly 6cm. I laboured under the misleading notion that it was harder to obtain a permis de construire using the load-bearing system, but Jean-Claude and Nathalie confirmed that, like me, they had experienced no problems in this respect. The authorities here are more concerned with the final aspect of the house rather than the materials with which it is built.

As I wandered around the empty house, touched the voluptuous walls and experienced again that palpable sense of wellbeing that comes from being enclosed by such a natural building product, I felt alarmingly broody. Having been through the pain of project-managing a construction, I never thought I’d wish to do it again. But maybe next time… using the big bales and a load-bearing system. Fewer problems with the rendering… without all those liaisons between wood and straw that can cause fissuring…

I envied the Vergnes, too, their time factor. They have somewhere to live and they can afford to do it in a manner that’s unhurried and thorough. Having come through la canicule (heatwave) in a caravan, we were haunted by the need for a permanent family home and the demanding deadline of Grand Designs: roughly ten months, from the digger’s first bite into virgin land to our first night under a pristine roof.

As a worrier prone to stress, I can honestly say that the race against time was the most stressful period of my life. The demands of coordinating a multi-national team of workers, ensuring timely delivery of materials, making daily and potentially critical decisions, swotting up on the theory the night before to keep one small step ahead of the game and dealing with the largely unknown quantity of straw bales often under the relentless gaze of a TV camera would sometimes coalesce into a kind of giant Monty Python foot just above my fragile cranium.

Local interest

That said, the programme’s deadline certainly galvanised us for the task. At times, the director’s demands could be irksome – since time, of course, equals money – but the regular presence of a film crew helped to create both an esprit de corps (or ‘corpses’ by the end) and considerable local interest in the project.

Inevitably we went over budget. One always does. Unless you do it all yourself, building with bales is not necessarily the cheap option. While the walls go up remarkably quickly, all that time-consuming (preparation for) rendering costs money. Discovering how frequently – and universally – the programme has been broadcast makes me pine for a royalty deal rather than the nominal one-off fee we received. But who am I to complain? We have a home that we love and a view that offers some new delight with every play of light. And our cosy walls have already saved us hundreds of euros in heating bills.

There are times when I huff and I puff about certain slight defects, convinced that I would do a better job next time round, but I’m still proud to show visitors around and still a big fan of bales. Straw makes a great building material. It’s heartening to think that our contribution to the ‘library’ of available expertise has helped to swell the number of pioneers out there – French, British and others – who want to have a go themselves.