We found it impossible to get anyone to ‘do’ our house design for us.  We had approached that architect who didn’t follow through on our meeting and we had actually worked with a greensmart house designer for several weeks – who in the end admitted they didn’t like strawbale at all so we parted ways (interestingly they had previously designed a strawbale home...). 
The Your Home Technical Manual published by the Australian government is actually a very good guide for building green (read this too!) and guided a lot of our materials selection – but it was Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language that really showed me how to incorporate our needs and wants into a passive solar home that will ‘feel’ right too – that and running my 100’s of versions past our permaculture designer and strawbale builder supervisor – they set me on the straight and narrow when I was getting way off course – thankfully!!

We actually had what I thought was a pretty straight forward list of requirements for our ideal house:

©      Rectangle shape and simple roof for bushfire safety and ease of building

©      Distinct front door

©      Kitchen with morning sunlight

©      Pantry on the south

©      ‘Water’ rooms grouped

©      Private parents’ area

©      Symmetry (it’s just the way my brain works!)

©      Reading nooks

©      Solar pergola

It really did seem simple enough to me – why couldn’t someone help us with it?  But it didn’t happen, and when we left to move down here and were still nowhere near having any plans to get drawn up, I just had to accept that it would happen in its own time.  We had already worked out (we might have been a bit slow on the uptake here I think ;-) that it we really needed to be down south, to be part of the community, meet people and find people to work with - so this was just part of it.

And being part of the community, meeting people and finding people to work with us, has been really easy now we are down here!  Go figure!!

So how did we come to want to build a strawbale house?  It was always my ideal, I just liked the idea of using a natural waste product to super-insulate a house, but my hubby was in no way convinced.

Until we met with the local permaculture designer down here that is – who, surprise surprise, happens to live in a strawbale house and has done for over 20 years.  Their current strawbale house is definitely ‘modern’ and very well finished – from the outside it looks like any other (better than others actually).  It is 'normal' looking (nothing way out or hippy) – so you really don’t know you are looking at a strawbale house until you are inside and told – shown the truth windows in the wall and the roof – yes the roof is strawbale too!

I was onto a winner here finding Warwick and Gillian Rowell.  We visited and talked designing our house and garden – Warwick put me onto Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language (the best book ever for understanding our built environment and why it makes us feel good or bad – borrow it from your library and read it!) – and while we were talking, my hubby kept looking around and saying “I can’t believe this is a strawbale house”.  He was expecting a three little pigs and big bad wolf makeup I think!

So he was sold on the idea – yay for me!  Every other eco-building idea is not too far off the beaten track so they were no problem – plus we came to the conclusion that the house was mine to design, the shed was his! 

Meeting Warwick and Gillian was a double win though, because their son, Richard Rowell, just happens to run “Your Building Company” – working specifically to help strawbale owner-builders get the house of their dreams.  Plus they all lived locally so had the perfect local knowledge.  It looked like it was all going to come together nicely – but I still wasn’t comfortable with building (I wanted to go with a builder who would do ‘the lot’ remember) – so the idea of being an owner-builder just wasn’t on my radar!

And it has taken me a good while to get over it!!