Wednesday, January 10, 2007

cob is more than a loaf of bread.


Alex and I have been entranced with this book on the right. It is all about cob homes - homes that are made of predominantly mud and a bit of straw. We are so inspired! Alex has even completed a two story floor plan for an amazing cob home with window seats, a library/quiet room and a bathroom with a bath with a view (my dream home involves both of these).

Cob homes are absolutely gorgeous, there are usually no straight lines in a cob home and they are often built to mirror and compliment the environment that they are built in with concepts such as a living (grass) roof.

If you are interested check out
I Love Cob - a blog all about cob homes with some great pictures and links.

In the meantime we will be building a cob oven with
Ted this year - which is a good start!

3 comments:

Andrew said...

Hey Rach,

Sounds great.

I used to love poring over two old books that my dad had kept from his uni days. One was called Shelter and the other The Dome Book. Shelter had all these wonderful pictures and drawings of traditional housing styles and crazy vernacular buildings that people had made. The best ones were those that had a lot of salvaged wood which meant they had an organic shape to them: no sharp corners. The Dome Book featured people who had built their own domes. The domes looked pretty cool, but I understand they're really difficult to seal properly (ie: they leak).

Anth and I would like to get a Smart Shax (http://www.smartshax.com.au/). Maybe at heart I'm an unreconstructed modernist at heart, but I like the idea of modular housing.

Meredith said...

sounds cool - i didn't know about cob houses. i am not at all thought about about ideal housing ... we just rent the same little place! rachel - where would you (ideally) build your cob house? ie what kind of natural environment would you like it to suit??

Jason said...

Just listened to a great mp3 on building cob houses from "Fuelling the Future - The challenge and opportunity of peak oil"

http://www.fuellingthefuture.org/audio.htm

Listen to the Rob Hopkins talk for the cob house stuff. Loads of other great mp3's there too.