Kate Noble Natural Builder: Strawbale Town House

Friday was a surprise extra day with the Het Leemniscaat team and to make me feel like a real member the boss presented me with a team shirt! It's far too nice and clean to actually wear at work though, I'm saving it for best.

We drove through the frosty winter fog to the outskirts of Brussels to a residential suburban street. Thom and his wife have spent 6 months living in the sitting room of her father's small inner city apartment with their 3 children aged 6, 2 and 4 months while they created a masterpiece of natural building. Tall, narrow, squeezed into a street of townhouses, they have built themselves a timber framed, straw-bale and hempcrete family home. They are hoping to move in before Christmas and although the house looks far from finished, I am sure they will be; they have a steely determination to leave their current living arrangements.

Our job was to render the exposed bales with clay to provide a level of fire protection while maintaining building breathability. They will board over the clay on the ceilings with natural, cement-free gypsum plasterboard so that ceiling lights can be fitted snug. The walls will have a second layer of clay applied and smoothed over which will then remain exposed. They might choose to paint it later with breathable paint or a clay slip but the dry clay itself is a lovely warm terracotta colour.

I have recently discovered that I have a fear of falling from a great height and so given the slack approach to health and safety in Belgium I opted to man the clay mixer for most of the day. It was harder work than the rendering but I preferred it to the light headedly dizzy feeling I got from trying to reach too far from the top of the scaffolding with the palette knife. It was quite a short day though and best of all the sun came out at lunch time so we could all sit outside in the warm.