Our plans are to create an earth friendly whimsical cob castle in stages. We have many ideas as we have been looking at all kinds of alternative structures. This will be a cob strawbale hybrid with some of the concepts found in earthships.

We would like our home to be an example and inspiration for others to build a creative earth friendly home. There is a keen interest in the area for natural building. Many people are building strawbale homes but I have not heard about any cob homes in this region.

Cob is basically monolithic adobe, which consists of earth, sand, clay & straw. The clay acts like glue to bond to the angular sand and the straw acts as rebar for tensile strength. Cob has great compressive strength and is self-supporting. Load-bearing wall's can be created at very low cost. The building technique is non-violent, quiet, easy to learn and fun. There are over 40,000 cob homes in Devon England over 300 years old, so they do last.

The house will be quite private as the other neighboring properties and road travelers will not be able to see the house. We have a perfect Southern exposure for passive solar heating of the structure.

We will build the passive solar house in sections (levels) up the side of the hill to increase the mass of the structure and minimize the loss of heat from the North side of the house. Above ground on the North side will be strawbale with lots of cob on the interior for extra temperature regulating mass. We will insulate under the perimeter of the home to take advantage of the earth mass under the home to store heat for winter and cool for the summer. The foundation will be made out of stone over an insulated rubble trench design.

We will build in a 2-4 ton masonry heater into the design for winter backup heating and install underground cooling tubes & chimney vent for summer cooling.

Roof water will be captured into a cistern to minimize our need to use the well water. We intend recycle grey water into interior planters then reuse this filtered water for the toilet and exteriour gardens. The idea is to use water at least 3 times before it exits the house.

We have a lot of creative ideas for aspects of the house. One of the concepts we will use in the design is to not think in-terms of rooms but think in-terms of activities and design ergonomic space for those activities. Cob lends itself to curved walls for artistic and creative use of space. Curved walls are also stronger and use less materials than straight walls.

Cob allows us to build organically curved walls that can be sculpted into work's of art. Straw is an excellent low cost renewable insulation material.

Basically we want to build a passive solar version of the following picture with natural building materials.

Click here for a further exploration about our design ideas

Click here for pictures of our property

Click here to see pictures of cob and other natural building examples

Click here for pictures of Patrick's cob cottage on Mayne Island BC

Links to other Earth Friendly web pages

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You can reach us at cobcastle@geocities.com