HOUSE of STRAW

Environmental concerns make hay-bale homes attractive alternatives

12/26/99

By BEN HELLWARTH

NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

bhellwarth@newspress.com

When it's finished early next year, the new Goleta house that Matt Buckmaster and Jan Vucinich are building will be Santa Barbara's first county-approved residence made with straw.

It's a construction method that's been used throughout history and was pioneered in the United States by -- who else? -- pioneers. Once hay baling machinery gained widespread use in the 1890s, it wasn't long before homesteaders recognized that the large, solid bales would make ideal building blocks in the grassy dunes of the Nebraska Sandhills, and other such places where lumber was scarce.

Now, a century later, with lumber and other resources at a premium, people like Buckmaster and Vucinich are among those rediscovering straw bale construction and embracing the aesthetic and environmental advantages of building a dream home out of straw.

"For some reason people respond very positively to the medium. It feels good, it looks good, it feels solid, it looks organic, it even looks European," said Greg McMillan, co-owner of Straw Dogs, the Atascadero contractors who consulted on the Buckmaster-Vucinich home and have built a half-dozen straw bale residences in San Luis Obispo County and a building at the Clairborne-Churchill winery.

"They're extremely comfortable to live in and extremely quiet. Eighty to 90 percent of the decibel level from outside is absorbed by the walls, by the straw," said McMillan, who worked eight years ago on California's first legal straw bale house -- a 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, two bath, ranch headquarters and residence in the Owens Valley.

The sound-proofing qualities of straw were particularly attractive to the owners in the process of transforming a San Roque house into the first permitted straw bale residence in the city of Santa Barbara.

"We're within 20 feet of Foothill Road and we wanted to absorb the sound," said Tim Buynak, the managing partner and CEO of Hatch and Parent, the Santa Barbara law firm whose new Mediterranean-style office at 1020 State St. won honors for using environmentally sensitive approaches. "We looked at a lot of different technologies and architectures and we just decided to try out the straw bale here because it just seems to be easy and friendly to do."

Besides the sound-proofing, straw bale homes are known for maintaining an even distribution of heat, and for insular properties that can dramatically reduce energy bills -- one of the reasons that straw bale construction is now included in state building codes.

"This house, when we first bought it, was really hot and noisy. The sound and noise were big problems to address," said Glorianna Buynak, Tim's wife. Straw bale construction not only proved to be the most practical and ecological answer, but the thick, plastered walls would help achieve the French country look of the remodeled and expanded house.

Several studies, including one by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, have confirmed that straw bales provide thermal efficiencies at least three times greater than conventional building systems. Many bale-home dwellers, in a variety of climates, have found that they scarcely have to heat or cool their homes at all.

"My fantasy is to never have to heat this place, but we have to have a heater for code," Buckmaster said the other day, pointing out the design strategy behind his modest two-story abode's south-facing windows. The plans call for tiles to be placed in the adjacent hallways to harness the sun's rays.

The straw also allows a building to breath, like a comfortable leather shoe, which makes the interior less stuffy than it might be with standard walls. Yet because the bales are tightly compacted and covered in stucco, they actually make a home "exceptionally resistant to fire," according to a National Research Council of Canada test cited by the U.S. Department of Energy. Not surprisingly, fire resistance is especially attractive to both Santa Barbara couples, who have been around long enough to be keenly aware of the area's historic wildfires and perpetual flammability.

U.S. energy officials also confirm another straw plus: With adequate safeguards, the bales won't rot and they provide fewer havens for pests, such as insects and vermin, than conventional wood framing.

Buckmaster, a co-owner of the green-minded Island Seed and Feed store in Goleta, and his wife, director of the Beit ha'Yeladim Preschool, were attracted to all these aspects of straw bale building, as were the Buynaks.

"We want to demonstrate it so other people can do it. It's not that difficult," Buckmaster said. The Buynaks plan to hold an open house, sometime next year once the bales are installed, to showcase the benefits of straw and other resource-saving methods.

In addition to straw's structural and environmental appeal, Buckmaster and Vucinich also found an old-fashioned social value.

"The other thing that became very appealing to me was the community being a part of the process and being able to involve friends and family who are not necessarily trained professionals in the building fields," Vucinich said.

During a weekend in early October, several dozen "friends and acquaintances and people who heard about it and wanted to be part of it" volunteered to help stack bales around the Patterson Avenue house's skeletal frame, Buckmaster said. He and his wife catered the two-day event.

"The best part about it is it's a community effort. There were 30 people putting up walls that had never done anything like it," said Buckmaster, 38, an experienced landscaper.

"You put the word out and people show up. Again because of the attraction people have to the medium," said McMillan, who oversaw the bale stacking. "There's a whole historical precedent of the barn raising, and people love to take control of their own shelter needs," he said. "It builds communities very strongly."

The Santa Barbara couples also liked the idea that the straw they purchased would have been among the 1 million tons of rice straw burned each fall after the rice harvests in the Central Valley. The annual burning, soon to be banned, creates a major source of air pollution and figured into the California Legislature's thinking in 1995 when it added straw bale guidelines to the state building code.

State lawmakers also sought to promote alternative markets for rice straw and to nurture the nascent straw bale housing market, pointing out in their legislation that "rice straw is an annually renewable source of cellulose that can be used as an energy-efficient substitute for stud-framed wall construction."

"This is going to be the wave of the future. There's a new consciousness not only in the United States but throughout the world to have a sustainable architecture," said Henry Lenny, a member of the city of Santa Barbara's Landmarks Commission and the architect on an ambitious Los Angeles project to build a model $4 million public library out of straw bales in the community of Lake View Terrace.

The bales are especially well-suited to achieving the library's desired Spanish colonial revival look, Henry noted, because of the way finished stucco surfaces gently swim over the slightly uneven bales underneath -- an effect visible around the exterior of the Buckmaster-Vucinich house that's reminiscent of the organic look of adobe.

"It immediately gives you a certain style of traditionalism. Particularly in California, there's a new renaissance in Hispanic architecture," said Lenny, a longtime Santa Barbara architect. "So this material kills several birds with one stone: It provides an aesthetically interesting structure, and it conserves energy."

The cost of building with straw is generally comparable to the cost of building a conventional custom home, experts say, and in the long run the energy savings could add up to a considerable windfall. In jurisdictions unfamiliar with the straw bale codes, a home builder may encounter some added bureaucratic friction, but apart from that, the only real drawback seems to be hearing repeated wisecracks from the uninitiated about the three little pigs and the big bad wolf.

Along the way, Santa Barbara's straw pioneers have discovered some techniques that enhance their dwellings' environmentally friendly attributes, such as the use of a nontoxic, fireproof and longer-lasting alternative to conventional Fiberglass home insulation called Air Krete. Made by a company in Weedsport, N.Y., the product consists largely of air, water and cement. It goes into wall and ceiling cavities like shaving cream, then hardens into a stable foam. Some of the principals in the two Santa Barbara straw bale projects were so impressed with the product that they formed a partnership that will soon make Air Krete available through Buckmaster's store.

The Buynaks are working with architect Jim Bell and contractor Dirk McKnight, both of Santa Barbara. Bell also drew up the blueprints for Buckmaster and Vucinich, and another Santa Barbara contractor, Joe Sevilla, is doing the building. But Buckmaster, a UCSB alum who once worked for the Isla Vista Park and Recreation District, and his wife have sought to cut their costs by taking on a number of tasks themselves since the foundation for their single-bedroom, 1,400-square-foot home was poured last February.

Perhaps most notable in the couple's efforts to make their home an example of sustainable architecture has been their reuse of old wood and fixtures. They began by carefully dismantling one of the turn-of-the-century sheds on their 1.5-acre property on North Patterson Avenue. The 400-square-foot structure, and the cavernous barn that still stands, date back to the days when the Goleta Walnut Co. got started on a portion of the 1,000-acre ranch then owned by the New York developer J.

D. Patterson. Virtually all the shed's redwood boards and battens were incorporated into the new house, which not only saved on wood but added rustic touches that match the old barn.

"All I took to the dump was the old shingle roof," Buckmaster said.

The recycling effort also went far beyond the property line. There are literally scraps from all over Santa Barbara built in to the house. There are leftover two-by-fours from, fittingly, the remodeling of the Environmental Defense Center headquarters. About 50 or 60 board feet came from an old barn that was torn down to make way for the Rancho San Marcos Golf Course. A smattering of two-by-eights were gleaned from another Montecito project.

In retrospect, Buckmaster's only regret is that he couldn't devote more time to rounding up old wood.

"There's a huge supply of it and it's a shame because it all goes to the landfill, and we talk about our landfill problems," he said, estimating that up to a third of his house could have been constructed of old wood, rather than the much smaller fraction he was able to collect.

Many of his windows, although like new, had been torn out of a Montecito home where the owner wanted to create more wall space for displaying artwork. The Buynaks, too, were able to reuse windows and will be employing other environmentally-minded techniques in their home.

An old bathroom sink was among the fixtures that Buckmaster spared a trip to the dump, but perhaps the greatest coup was salvaging the heavy doors taken out during the remodeling of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Still stenciled on the glass are the words "Museum Store Entrance" and "Not an Exit."

Buckmaster and Vucinich don't intend to remove the signs, but by March, when they move from an old trailer into the county's first straw bale house, the doors will serve as both entrance and exit.

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