I believe it's important for everyone to experience a straw bale house. My friends, Bill and Athena Steen shook up the building world with their 1994 groundbreaking book, The Straw Bale House, culminating their years of experience into a how-to history of the art.

People the world over have been building mud plaster dwellings forever but the straw adds the high insulation values as well as infill structure. Coupled with the cheap cost and availability of straw, this becomes a viable and environmentally sane answer to modern construction.

But I am more inspired by the experience of living in an adobe structure. When I lived outside the San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico, I became very excited by builders who were combining adobe and strawbale. The quality of light and color is especially wonderful at the end of the day when the fading sun causes the straw in the mud plaster to take on a golden hue.

Bill and Athena are true masters of interior lime and clayslip plaster finishes. Surfaces are colored with natural clays, layered over the straw then burnished to a marble-like finish. As you can see from these pictures, colors and shapes can be as wild or as subtle as you desire.

The Steens have been working for many years with the poorer villages of northern Mexico helping them to build strong, beautiful and inexpensive dwellings. If you wish to learn or study straw bale further, contact us or visit their site at the Canelo Project.