Unbelievable COB Village Built With MUD!

hi i'm greg lehmann and today we'll be touring my cobb and straw bale house in goshen indiana [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the style of this house was inspired by uh cottages in the southwest of england um in the county of devon where there are thousands of cop cottages that were built hundreds of years ago some of them are still standing and lived in today i have done quite a bit of traveling and while i was doing a walking tour around devon i was inspired by how these cottages looked and that gave me this the basis of the style which i built this house so in 1999 i went to a three week long uh complete natural building course which ianto taught in outside tyrod colorado and that was my basic education in cobb along with that i have also taken over the course of the years many other workshops at different schools the form of this house is a three isled hall house which is a vernacular northern european building forum in which the center of the house acts like the same function of like a courtyard in a different kind of a climate you might have a courtyard of course in the north you want to keep an enclosed space and so this particular niches are off to the sides um also i based the proportions of this house on the golden section and square so almost every proportion whether it be the how the beams are cut like the width versus the depth of the beams the ceiling heights the width of each space the size of the niches how they relate to each other is all based on the golden section the window shapes or your squares or golden sections and so that repeating a pattern over and over within your project can make it be visually more cohesive this site here is actually in an area we're in the city limits which is atypical for a natural bully a lot of them around the country we're in the city limits of goshen indiana so this house is has to follow all the building codes um and we are zoned r2 which means it's allowed to build a duplex here so part of my ability to build the house was the idea i would build it as a duplex so the lower level has a complete separate entrance separate utilities separate address number and by having that as a rental it's allowed me to defray the cost of the building process so this house is part of a in process community which is a two acre site in the city limits of goshen indiana and it is essentially a pocket neighborhood an architect ross chapin has written a book on pocket neighborhoods which the idea is is that your rather than your house is all lined up along the street and everybody not knowing your neighbors is that the houses are built as a cluster and everybody's front porch faces inward so you have a sense of community you might have a community garden or a town square in the center on our two acre site we have currently this house which is strawbell and cobb which i built from 2001 to 2006. there's next door is a manufactured house from the 80s which was the original house on site that's rented out and then we built a duplex which is conventionally framed but super insulated on the site as well and then i have a new cobb hybrid house which is i started in 2016 i've been very slowly building in today's tour we'll be focusing on my first house which i built with the straw bale and cobb hybrid which i currently live in and also there's a new house on site which is a cobb and conventionally framed hybrid we'll be seeing that house as well to build this house my original construction drawings were fairly idealistic and purist as far as building materials as it turned out i had to hire a structural engineer because i have a post and beam frame that's built together on logs and so they drew up a concrete foot with rebar so we have a conventional footer and then above grade is fieldstone from local farms which comes up about 18 inches to protect these strawberry and cobwebs from moisture and the house has a load-bearing uh post and beam frame which is bolted together with half-inch lag bolts um the frame is built from a wood mill at a local sawmill plus the vertical elements and some of the horizontal beams are actually round tree trunks which are from this site or within 15 miles of this site after we got the basic frame of the structure up then in 2001 um september 2001 i hosted a cobb workshop taught by anto evans of cobb cottage company we had 15 participants who camped in the backyard and helped get the cobb while going and we got i'd see half or more of the cobb wall done within that week after the cobb workshop was finished i continued working in the fall and then for the winter tarp the house off and worked another job for a few months in the spring then um moved into the house um kind of camped out for a summer while we were still building the next season the straw bale wall and then the walls then after that got clay straw plastered it's a base coat and then lime sand plastered as a second coat after finishing the lime plaster on the outside walls then we put cedar shingles on the roof and then finish the interior of the house so here we are at the outside of the house on the backyard side uh the lower level of the house is a separate unit it's an up down duplex you can see one row of windows along the bottom that's where the rental unit is and i live on the upstairs uh currently with my wife this whole wall of the house is built on a cob it's between 18 to 24 inches thick depending on whether you're at the bottom of the wall or the top of the wall this is the south end of the house with the big windows facing south up upstairs and then also you can see the lower entrance of the house of the second unit is on the lower level underneath the porch this side of the house has the main entrance to the upstairs level and you'll notice the eyebrow windows over the windows and the door itself those are a typical feature you would see in a english cottage in with a thatched roof this is a cedar shaker roof but it evokes some of the same similar curves this side of the house which is facing east and also the north side of the house are all straw bale which gives us a higher insulation value in some of these walls that have fewer windows so now let's go take a look inside the house [Music] this is the main room of the house the living room it has a cathedral ceiling which is about 19 feet tall um the vertical elements are tree trunks that were gathered locally and then there's some roughs on structure above that filling out the frame we have about 90 square feet of glass facing south which gives us some light in the winter time as far as solar gain underneath the windows there is a straw bale bench that's sculpted with cob on top of that and it actually has some radiant heat tubes in it so it could be heated one of the things i really enjoyed about building with cobb was the ability to sculpt it into any shape that you want to do and here we have a stained glass window which is in the shape of a catenary arch the stained glass window is something i built at a workshop at the estimara design build school in vermont next we'll take a look at the dining area which is also a niche off of the main room this niche does curve outwards on the wall to give you a little more space and have a more round focused area in which to put a table for conversation it also has a small stained glass window and some other windows that look outside into the woods one thing we discovered after building the house was that the cobb wall was cold to the touch in the winter versus the straw bale wall which is a warm cobb has a very low insulation value due to its high density so really isn't an appropriate material for northern indiana climate so in the new house the new cobb house which we'll look at next we did a cavity wall with insulation in the middle of the wall similar to you would have in any other conventional masonry building cobb is a mixture of sand straw and clay in a traditional cob house the cob would be a structural wall and would hold up the roof in this particular house the post and beam structure is what does all the work of holding the roof up and the cob is an infill section there's a wood stove in the center of the house it was a old wood stove that i got from a friend for i think 100 bucks and we heated with that for several years we do have gas heat back up as well upstairs in the loft area there's a bedroom so let's go take a look at that next and this is the main bedroom of the house it's upstairs in the loft it continues the same architectural details as the rest of the house this room does have exposed cherry beans in the ceiling and the walls are built out of cherry as are the doors and all of the trim so now taking a look at the kitchen this is one of the cobwebs on the inside there's a niche in the cobweb which is one nice thing about cobb is you can make little shelves or niches on the inside of your walls we did a concrete countertop with a gray dye for the countertops and then we are actually in the city limits we are on city water and sewer and gas and electric at this part of the kitchen we have also the washer and dryer because we don't have a basement given that we have rented that lower level out and we have maple butcher block counters along with concrete on the side as well so next to the kitchen we have the other bedroom in the house which is on the main floor and coming through this way we head to the bathroom there is one inclusive bathroom which has it's the shower and everything is all in one space which keeps the footprint very small and it's also a barrier-free bathroom you can see some of the round framing elements in that bathroom as well now let's take a look at the new cobb house which is part of the same property just down the brick driveway [Music] this is the cobb house that i started in 2016 have been working on gradually now we're on to the finishing steps it's park cobb and the south and west ends of the wall are actually conventionally framed this house maintains the same theme of english cottage style with some local fieldstone at the base and the cobwell with the lime plaster on the walls this house has a slate roof and granite front steps which are something that would be a more permanent building material and last a lot longer than the wood of the other house the spatial layout of this house is very similar to the other house and then we have tree trunks framing a cathedral ceiling living room it niches along the sides and we have a bedroom loft up as well [Music] in this house i'm focusing on refining the details of the framing and also making the sculpt and cob details more precise and delicate a unique feature of this house is this south facing wall which is black metal flashing which will be the base layer of a solar collection which will heat water tubes and which will drain back into a tank in the ground and then be pumped into the floor of the house to heat the house building these houses over the last number of years has led to some positive relationships with friends and community coming together to help and my parents have helped a lot with the projects as well my wife and i really enjoyed living in this house the struggling cub house for the last 15 years building with natural materials specifically the masonry aspects the fieldstone the cob the plasters all those things to me are something i'm very passionate about it's not about making money or trying to develop real estate it's about creating beautiful places that can be used by myself or other people in the future if you're interested in learning more about designing your own home or building a natural materials there's lots of books out there two of the books regarding design of houses and design philosophy are a pattern language by christopher alexander and how buildings learn by stuart brand a good resource for uh learning how to build the cob is the hand sculpted house by janto evans michael smith and linda smiley it shows the basics of cop construction and details another book that's really good with earthen construction is called earth construction a comprehensive guide by hugo hoban and hubert juilliard this book has a more of an internationalist focus of traditional earth buildings in other continents africa europe and different places around the world and more technical details if you're interested in more information about these houses i have a website gregorylayman.com which has more detailed information on the construction techniques and also some other projects i've done over the years [Music] me [Music]

Channel: Natural Buildings

Views: 29,735

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Id: B55OT1mf0C0

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022