"....the Harrison retreat is so elegant and awe-inspiring that it's not unusual for first-time visitors to drop their voices to a whisper as they step through one of its many doors into the main hall."

Janet Johnston and John Swearingen co-authored an article for Fine Homebuilding magazine on "Building a Straw-Bale House". (June/July 1996).

This article has recently been republished in Tauton's series, "The Best of Fine Homebuilding", in the volume of Energy Efficient Building.

Contra Costa Times 10/13/2002--Owner builder's Story

By Jose A. Lopez

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

EL SOBRANTE - For some neighbors, it has become a weekend gathering place.

It's not a restaurant or a bar, and no signs mark its location except a wooden brown mailbox with numbers painted on.

The only access is down a driveway, where smooth, gray dirt dusts your shoes as you walk until it turns to a layer of dry, crunchy straw.

It's here, on a tree-lined, subdivided back lot on Hillside Drive that a recurring cast of neighbors, relatives and friends have turned out week after week to help Dave Green, 30, and Erica Peng, 34, build their dream home from bales of straw.

In these hectic times, when communities are becoming increasingly isolated and some neighbors don't even know each other's names, Peng and Green have found a way to unite the community along this quiet street off San Pablo Dam Road that dead-ends at Kennedy Grove Regional Park.

On a recent weekend, more than 50 people gathered at the site to help Green and Peng stack and brace the tightly packed rice straw bales that will one day be the walls of their house.

Before that, about a dozen helped unload 400 bales, haul them down the driveway on rented flatbed trucks and store them inside the unfinished house.

The couple and their cadre of helpers hope to lay down the roof and coat the bales with stucco before the first heavy rains.

The community support is not a matter of chance but something Peng and Green have actively pursued as they try to establish themselves in the neighborhood.

Peng, who met Green while taking part in an apprenticeship program on sustainable agriculture at UC Santa Cruz, says that all of it -- using straw as the primary building material, enlisting the help of the neighborhood and friends during the construction, and the extensive garden they plan to harvest once the house is complete -- is an extension of how she and Green try to connect to the natural world.

"It was hard at first to ask for help, because we're all coming out of this culture that's isolated, where everyone is supposed to be independent and self-sufficient," says Peng. "But for us, it was clear from the beginning that we couldn't do this alone."