The straw-bale house

If
you tell Sharon Kissack her house smells like a barn, she won’t be insulted.
She’s in the final stages of installing straw-bale walls inside, and the scent
of sweet, dry hay is just one of the advantages of her unusual choice of
materials. Another is the cozy feeling the two-foot-deep walls impart to the
rooms — every windowsill can accommodate a window seat. Undulating edges and
curving corners replace the sharp geometry of standard homes.

            When Kissack, who is an artist and a
writer, and her husband Barry, an optometrist, built this house in the village
of Honeoye Falls a couple of years ago, they wanted to evoke the adobe
architecture of New Mexico, where they had lived for eight years. “I just love
adobe architecture. It feels enveloping, nurturing, and natural,” Kissack says.
“Straw bales are the closest you can come to that feeling.”

            She’s getting help from Mary Golden
of Gaiatecture Design, a local architectural company that specializes in
earthen plastering, a process used in straw-bale construction.

            “With straw bales, there’s a harmony
with nature,” Golden says, noting the connection between the earthy textures
inside and the natural world right outside the window. “There’s a balance. It’s
cozy.”

            Golden and Kissack are plastering
the walls, a process that uses chopped straw, clay, sand, and water to smooth
and seal the bales. It’s messy, but it’s also really fun, the two women say.
With buckets of toffee-colored clay and brown silt at their feet, they brush on
a golden plaster mixture that, when the light is right, sparkles.

            “This is a special clay from La
Madera, New Mexico,” Golden explains. “It’s full of mica — it comes out of
the ground like this,” she says, rubbing it onto my hand. The clay is creamy
and iridescent — just like that shimmering blush teens buy at cosmetic
counters to spread on their shoulders and cheeks.

            “This stuff is wonderful,” Golden
exclaims, running her hand up and down a wall. “If you rub it on the walls with
your hands, the oils in your skin bring the mica and bits of straw to the
surface.”

Kissack would
have built a
true straw-bale house — one with bale-hay walls inside and out — but she
wanted to be sensitive to the historic architecture of the village of Honeoye
Falls. Instead, she used stick construction to build a home that “looks like an
old barn converted into a house,” she says. It’s worked out just fine, she
says, to add straw bales to several of the walls inside.

            Straw-bale houses made their first
appearance in the United States in the 1890s in Nebraska, Kissack says.
Affordable, easy to construct, and insulated, straw-bale structures appealed to
pioneers who faced lumber shortages.

            Bale-hay construction has continued
to lure builders who appreciate their low-cost and high R-value. The R-value,
or insulation value, can be R-30 or higher, compared to roughly R-19 for a
standard wall with six inches of insulation, Kissack says. The rooms where she
has two or more straw-bale walls stay cool in the summer and warm in the
winter, Kissack says.

            Two curving, bulging walls envelope
one corner of a snug guest room on the first floor, where clay from a local
quarry coats the bales. The slate gray clay has transformed the walls into
rock-like surfaces.

            “It feels good to me,” Kissack says.
Perhaps, she says, because it “goes back to our old caveman days.”

This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2002.