The First Straw: Building the First Straw Bale Home in Virginia

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Designed so that the southern sun beams all the way across the main room at Winter Solstice, Hanuman’s house is a natural passive solar collector. Locally made bricks absorb the radiant heat by day and release it back into the room at night. The interior walls are plastered with a mixture of clay from Hanuman’s yard (the Charlottesville area is said to have the best clay for adobe in the country), lime, and sand; the adobe gives Photo By Philip Beaurline

In 1995, Hanuman Bertschy was introduced to the idea of building homes with straw bales during a permaculture workshop. She immediately took a fancy to the concept. “I’m just basically natural,” she says. “And I’m somewhat allergic to anything synthetic. So this sounded like a great idea.”

About a year later, when she moved to Yogaville, an ashram founded by Sri Swami Satchidananda in Buckingham, Virginia, Hanuman began to pursue her new passion in earnest. She bought The Straw Bale House, by Bill and Athena Steen, David Bainbridge, and David Eisenberg (Chelsea Green, 1994), and began talking to other area residents who had researched this building method. What she learned from her neighbors wasn’t exactly encouraging—opposition from the conservative county building commissioners had kept would-be straw balers at bay—but Hanuman decided to take the leap.

“Until I went to the building inspector, I was ­really nervous that inspection would make the house impossible,” she says. “But the inspector was new in his position, and he was really willing to work with us. He even watched a video I gave him that I had ordered from The Last Straw [The Grassroots Journal of Straw Bale and Natural Building].” Hanuman recalls that the building inspector’s usual response to each phase of her unconventional plans was, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And in most cases, he let the plans move through.

The result is a simple, sweet, 950-square-foot home (the breadth of the bales means Hanuman has about 730 square feet of interior living space) that Hanuman managed to build for about $30 per square foot. Hanuman’s friends and neighbors from Yogaville and Twin Oaks, a nearby commune, helped raise 3,000 bales, and Hanuman laid the floor of locally fired bricks.

As cold weather moved in, Hanuman took refuge in her new home before the walls were plastered—a move she doesn’t recommend. “We had a big blizzard,” she says. “It was a cold winter. Straw’s a good insulator, but not until you get the stucco on.”

In addition, wheat moths infested the naked bales. Before she plastered, Hanuman sucked hundreds of them from the bales with a shop-vacuum daily. The moth problem ended once the bales were sealed, but Hanuman caulked around the ceiling beam and floors as an added precaution.

Sited with large southern windows to take advantage of passive solar gain, Hanuman’s home also reflects the charm and ingenuity of its creator. She salvaged most of the interior fixtures, including a bathroom corner
sink from the late 1800s, a 1950s kitchen sink, and a soapstone wood­burning stove from a local restaurant that was being torn down. She used extra marble from a recently built home on the ashram for her kitchen ­counters and incor­po­rated scrap tile from the Lotus, a large spiritual ­monument in the center of Yogaville, into her shower.