Straw bale living in East Aurora By Jennifer Wettlaufer; photos by kc kratt The pickup truck fishtails in the snow, fighting its way uphill in a mechanical version of homing its way to native land. It has taken this trip many times to the edge of the woods where young married couple Sarah Buckley, a nurse at Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital, and Scott Redding, owner of Above & Beyond Tree Expert Company, LLC—and droves of weekend-hero volunteers—build a house. When the truck finally slides to a stop, two cheerful orange and white cats named Straw and Bale watch to see what will happen next. A two-story wall of windows, facing due solar south, makes a bright greeting from the seventeen-acre property on Route 78 along Stony Bottom Creek. Interior of the Straw-Bale House. Once inside the dramatic timber-frame-1,100-plus-square-foot straw-bale house, it is easy to see that not every wall consists of straw bales. The thick bale walls stand deeply notched around windows, and have a textured earthen-plaster surface. The theory behind straw-bale construction, Redding says, is to get everything up to temperature and keep it there with small energy boosts. A computer in this house continuously collects information from five sensors dedicated to temperature changes outside, inside the house, and in the five-inch-thick concrete floor. “There must be close to thirty tons of plaster on the walls, plus the straw bales themselves, to absorb and hold heat,” says Redding. The south windows alone provide enough energy that on a recent 30-degree day, the inside temperature was already 71 degrees at 9 a.m. Artistic patches of earthen plaster cover a wall in a closet-sized utility room, Buckley’s experiments towards finding the perfect color and consistency for the breathable wall treatments. She used three different pigments, “yellow ochre, red iron oxide, and burnt umber. I just mixed them together with lime, clay, and sand, and had to find one that would not crack.” Cracking, she says, signaled too much clay in the mix. The resulting walls are luxurious and unique; Buckley has a favorite wall upstairs, one hand-polished by plastic food-container lids. Despite how seemingly inexpensive it must be to pile up bales of straw to build walls, the dramatic and efficient beauty of the house does not come free. The couple hired an architect, a plumber, a cabinetmaker for the kitchen, and an electrician. Considering dollars spent and the true value of free labor from family, friends, and fascinated strangers, Redding knowingly comes up with “$300 per square foot.” The house reflects its owners’ worldly knack for pulling diverse beauties together. (Even the couple’s own meeting was a little unlikely; they met in Thailand, he from England and she a native East Auroran.) A wide variety of hand-polished woods glow throughout the house—many resurrected from Redding’s landscaping projects—including hickory kitchen cabinets and black walnut countertops. Antique plumbing fixtures add character to the new kitchen and include a striking six-foot cast iron sink on legs that Redding calls “insanely heavy.” A neighbor’s discarded wood stove charms the living space near the entrance and was lit only about every four or five days before installation of a radiant floor heating system. There is no basement to soak up floor heat, and the foundation achieves frost protection by sitting twelve inches below grade. With orange cats and thick walls for warmth, and a cold stony creek to jump into after a hot summer day of building, the straw bale life is temperate and sweet. Jennifer Wettlaufer is a science writer who dreams of designing a pedal-powered computer that works with a solar-powered bicycle so she doesn’t have to do anything at all. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top