Our straw room is a self-build project that highlights the ease of building with natural materials making it an affordable and accessible solution for the UK’s housing needs. The walls are solely load bearing straw bales, with lime render to both the inside and outside surfaces. This construction technique creates a building envelope that has high thermal mass, high U-value of 0.1 and fantastic acoustic qualities. All the materials we used (straw, sheeps wool, lime render and timber) are low embodied energy materials that create an architecture with health and well-being benefits over traditional construction methods.

Straw bale construction allows for a resoundingly carbon positive building due to the amount of carbon stored in the walls and the low embodied energy of all the materials used. Straw is an abundantly available by-product of crop cultivation. It is estimated that each year 5.6 million tonnes of straw is ploughed back in to the ground in the UK. This equates to the rough equivalent of wall materials to build 640,000 homes in the UK.

The Straw Room has been an amazing test-bed for developing ideas with a wide range of collaborators, including the Natural School of Building, engineers of Milk Structures, Cecilia Sjoholm the artist for our lime wash painted walls, and a host of other volunteers throughout the build.